


The Great Below

by triedunture



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Angst, Crowley is Bad at Feelings (Good Omens), Crowley is Good With Kids (Good Omens), Established Relationship, Flashbacks, Fluff and Angst, Fluffy Ending, Heaven & Hell, Human Aziraphale (Good Omens), Hurt Crowley (Good Omens), Hurt/Comfort, Isolation, Kid Fic, M/M, Misunderstandings, Mortality, Post-Canon, Protective Aziraphale (Good Omens), Psychological Torture, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Rescue Missions, Secrets, Wet & Messy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-08
Updated: 2020-01-15
Packaged: 2021-01-25 14:54:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 29,804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21358060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/triedunture/pseuds/triedunture
Summary: Crowley is captured and dragged back to Hell. Aziraphale journeys Downstairs to rescue him, but their secrets are catching up to them both.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 236
Kudos: 514
Collections: Hurt Omens, My faves - Good Omens Whump





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Tags to be added as we go. Subscribe for updates! Aiming for weekly.

The bell above the door gave a cautious chime as Aziraphale entered the bookshop. "Crowley?" he called, standing in the doorway and waiting for the answer. 

It never came. 

"Must've gone out," Aziraphale muttered, and stepped inside to relieve himself of his hat and raincoat. The passing storm had almost blown itself out by now, just mist hanging in the cool London air. It was a dank sort of day, the kind best spent in under a thick duvet wearing fuzzy socks. 

Aziraphale had only left the shop at all because— Well, it had been necessary. He was glad to be back where it was (at least nominally) warm. 

He puttered around for a bit. It was one of his favorite things to do, puttering. He moved a stack of books from one place to another, then remembered something he'd been meaning to do in the back room, and then dropped everything to make himself a cup of cocoa when a craving came upon him. On the way to the pantry he discovered a mug still brimming with coffee, dead cold, sitting sulkily on a low table. 

"Crowley," he scoffed in the quiet. The demon never picked up after himself. Aziraphale brought the mug into the abbreviated kitchenette and scrubbed it clean. 

The mist outside strengthened back into rain, and Aziraphale sipped at his cocoa and watched it make tendrils on his windows. 

It was getting late, he realized. He glanced over at the telephone, and then away. 

"I should tidy upstairs," he said aloud just to hear some noise. The silence in the shop was unnerving. It was so rarely this quiet anymore, ever since the Apocalypse-That-Wasn't. Ever since Crowley had let himself in after their lunch at the Ritz and...had never really left. It hadn't been _ that _ long, Aziraphale thought. A few months or so—no, more. It had been last summer, hadn't it? And now they were well into autumn. 

The angel climbed the stairs and turned his attention to the light cleaning he somehow never managed to finish even though he had no real job to keep him occupied these days. Funny how time just slips away, he mused as he fished a pair of black socks (Crowley's) from where they'd fallen behind a bureau. Aziraphale flapped them free of dust, then rolled them into a neat bundle. He nearly opened the top drawer (also Crowley's) to tuck them back where they belonged, but he stopped just shy of touching the ceramic drawer-pull. 

He left the socks on Crowley's pillow instead. 

Aziraphale kept himself busy and pointedly ignored the clock hands creeping along. He hardly noticed when night fell; it was raining too hard outside to make much difference, anyway. When there were no more little chores to be done, Aziraphale rewarded himself for his hard work by pouring a glass of wine, then curled up on the battered old sofa in the back room.

The wineglass, housing a heady red, dangled from his fingertips untasted. Aziraphale watched the rain, watched the clock. Looked again to the telephone. Looked away. Lifted the glass to his lips, then set it down without taking a sip.

He was picking up the receiver before he knew what was happening. He only knew one number by heart. His fingers picked it out on the rotary wheel. He waited, phone to his ear, as the line rang and rang and rang. 

And went to an ancient ansaphone. 

"Hey, uh, this is Anthony—" 

Aziraphale replaced the receiver. Well, Crowley so rarely returned to his Mayfair flat these days; more likely the demon was out and about. He rummaged in his desk, finally finding a slim, brown leather diary. It only held one phone number, a mobile. 

He dialed it. 

"You've reached the voicemail box of—" said a robot.

"Anthony J. Crowley," said Crowley, sounding bored and somewhat irritated. 

The robot returned. "Please leave your message after the tone." A tone sounded. 

"Crowley, pick up," said Aziraphale, who didn't quite understand how cellular voicemail worked and didn't care to learn. When that did not produce the desired effect, he sighed into the line, down the long string of electrons and the spaces between. Somewhere in the cloud, his voice would be forever captured. A letter in a bottle, bobbing in an unfeeling sea. He sounded so small and insignificant, his voice cracking. "Crowley? Where have you gone?"

* * *

Crowley had gone straight to Hell. There had been no stops along the way. And, as you can imagine, he went not under his own power nor with his consent. 

He regained consciousness somewhere around the first sub-basement, blinking in the filthy dark and realizing belatedly that he was being dragged by the arms between two hulking demons who appeared to have grotesque aardvarks stuck to their heads.

Aardvarks, he thought hazily. Must remember to tell Aziraphale about that one. 

Then it all came flooding back to him, and Crowley remembered that he had more important things to worry about.

He'd been on his way out. Had wanted to take the Bentley for a spin, really let her loose. It had been raining hard when he left the bookshop. The car had been waiting in its usual spot, miraculously right in front. Crowley recalled enjoying the sight of his own reflection in its perfect paint job, then frowning as two brutish shapes rose up behind him in the shiny black. 

The back of his head still throbbed. 

He noted distantly that they were now in the second sub-basement. There were about seventy-five sub-basements altogether, though Crowley had never visited the lowest levels. He was well acquainted with roughly the first fifty or so, and they were all much the same as the one he was currently being dragged through: over-crowded, stuffy, dark, and filled with the shambling, moaning damned. 

Not "moaning" in the zombie-specific sense. Complaining. Many were new, being so close to the surface, and still thought that perhaps if they lodged a complaint to the proper person in just the right nasty tone, they might find their way out of the place. The damned were, as they've ever been, a thick lot. 

"Which Circle is this?" sniped one lost soul as she elbowed her way past Crowley and his captors. "I was given the distinct impression I would find myself in one of the better ones, and this can_ not _ be one of the better ones."

Circles, really? Crowley fought the urge to roll his eyes; his dark sunglasses were no longer perched on his face—knocked off in the scuffle, he suspected—and he wanted to avoid tipping off the two aardvarks that he was fully conscious. He kept his eyes slitted and his body, a limp weight.

Dante had gotten it all wrong, of course. There were no Circles in Hell, no stark divisions between rapists and murderers and adulterers and liars and thieves and hypocrites and people who'd been a bit lazy. In the first place, humans didn't fall into those neat categories very often, did they? One might very well have two or three of those boxes ticked, and then where do you put them? In the worst slot? The least crowded? It would be a silly system. 

In the second place, Hell prided itself on its bureaucracy and, as we all know, there can be no logic in that. For the damned, the first several weeks in Hell were devoted almost entirely to waiting on the telephone with the automated system which was supposed to assign a case number as well as a reference number and, if you managed to slog your way through the push-button menu, promised to give you all the information you would need to begin your Hellish existence officially. The final paperwork was never delivered, however, and so millions upon millions of lost souls found themselves shuffling through the dank hallways of Hell's middle management offices, trying to locate the correct representative who could stamp the correct form. That representative, unfortunately, was always on indefinite leave.

A lot more effective than having them push around boulders. 

"Where did they want him, again?" one aardvark asked the other over Crowley's head. 

The second aardvark grunted. "C-9, I think. Or was it 10?" 

Crowley suppressed a jolt of shock. It didn't matter if it was 9 or 10; the whole of the C block was not a place he wanted to be. 

(He didn't want to be anywhere in Hell, actually, but Department C was particularly low on his list of preferred spots.) 

"What's the C stand for, anyway?" said the first aardvark. 

Must be new to the job, Crowley thought. Any demon worth their salt knew the answer. And the other aardvark shared it gladly. 

"Confessional," he said, dragging Crowley further down into the Pit.

* * *

Anathema Device was sitting in her kitchen when she heard the knock on the door. It startled her, this knock. Most things startled her these days. She was finding it very difficult, the transition from "knowing a little about what's going to happen always" to "knowing nothing about anything that is going to happen ever." Like any good witch, however, she persisted despite these challenges. 

She answered the door, trying to hide her further surprise. "Oh," she said. "Erm, hello again."

"Good afternoon," said the angel. "I do hope I've not come at a bad time?" If he had a hat, he'd have removed it and clutched it against his chest. As it was, he just fiddled with his hands.

"Not at all, Aziraphale." She opened the door wider. "Come in, come in. Sorry, I don't have any tea to offer you; I'm fresh out. I didn't know you were coming."

"I probably should have phoned ahead, except—" He gave a self-conscious little laugh as he stepped inside the little cottage. "Well, we didn't exactly exchange numbers, my dear."

Anathema smiled tightly. It was true that the number of people who had been present for the big showdown at the End of the World could be counted on just a few hands, but after the party concluded, so to speak, there was very little reason for the attendees to stay in touch. The Antichrist was grounded and his mobile taken away, for a start. 

Aziraphale glanced around the cottage, clearly at a loss to say something pleasant about the rental, which was in a bit of a shambles. Despite living here for over a year, Anathema was not the most organized young lady. "Is your young man about, then?" he asked instead.

"No, Newt is in London," Anathema said. "Probably seems weird to you, but after such a fast start, we decided we should take things slow."

"Ah. Long distance." Aziraphale clacked his fists together. He'd read about the trials of such things in books of a romantic bent. 

"Exactly." The smile tightened even more. "Please, sit." Anathema gestured to the threadbare sofa which had been upholstered in a paisley velvet sometime around the middle of the last century. The two of them sat, Anathema smoothing her dark skirts over her legs. "Not to be rude, but is there some reason you're paying me a visit?"

"Oh, yes. I'm so sorry. I must be taking up so much of your time," Aziraphale babbled. His fingers threaded together in his lap. He stared down at them. "It's only, I wasn't sure who else could help me."

"What sort of help are you looking for?" 

Aziraphale looked up, his strange, many-colored eyes shining in distress. "It's Crowley," he said. "I can't find him." 

Anathema's eyebrows arched. "Can't find him?" 

"Yes, I— He didn't come home one evening so I went looking." Aziraphale stood and began to pace the length of the cozy sitting room, wringing his hands in front of his belly. "The flat in Mayfair, I checked there first, of course. Crowley still keeps it though he hardly does more than pop in every few days to water the plants. He says the light in the bookshop is all wrong for them, so he can't bring them there. Not that there would be any space for them, what with all our things!" He gave a slightly hysterical hiccough.

"Aziraphale." Anathema rose and placed her hand on his shoulder to halt his third go-round. "Take a breath."

The angel did so, not that it did any good. He gazed at her in abject misery. "He wasn't there. I spent all night and the rest of this morning searching. All over London. All the places Crowley might go. And his car—" He paused. Licked his lips with a nervous swipe of his tongue. "His car is still parked outside my shop. He wouldn't leave that behind, not if he were—" His soft, well-manicured hand pressed against his lips. "I'm just so worried."

"It's going to be fine," Anathema said in what she hoped was a soothing manner. "You did the right thing, coming to me."

Aziraphale nodded, hand falling. "Yes, yes, I thought as much. What with your skills in witchcraft." 

"Exactly. I can help." She gave his shoulder a reassuring pat. "I'll need something of his. Something he's touched and held, the more often, the better."

"Of course, yes, I brought—" Aziraphale dug about in his pockets and produced a black sock, a spare pair of sunglasses that had been left on a windowsill, an old snakehead belt buckle that Crowley didn't wear much anymore but had for most of the late '90s through the naughties (a term which, had Crowley been present, he would have pulled a nasty face at), and an absurdly complicated wristwatch that Aziraphale had found on Crowley's bedside table. "Will these do?" 

"Wow. Uh, sure." Anathema accepted the armful of stuff. "This is great."

"I wasn't certain what would be most helpful." He reached into his coat and pulled out a slim black volume with a plain cover. Aziraphale hesitated, looking at the thing with a sort of heavy regret. "He held this in his hands. Quite a lot. I would ask that you not open it, please," he said as he added it to the teetering stack in Anathema's arms.

"All right." She watched him closely, then nodded toward the kitchen. "Can you get a bowl down from the cupboard and fill it with water?"

Aziraphale rushed to follow the order while Anathema carried her burden to the breakfast nook and began arranging Crowley's things in a pile. Truthfully she only needed one item to work a location spell but she didn't want to tell that to Aziraphale. Best to let him think every little bit helped, was her feeling. 

She selected the mysterious book, which had a frightfully strong aura for an inanimate object, and placed it in the center of the table. It would be the touchstone, she decided. Crowley's strange, Hellish fingerprints were all over the thing—mystically speaking.

Aziraphale set a porcelain cereal bowl brimming with tap water onto the kitchen table with all due care. "So how does this, erm, work?" he asked.

"It's very simple," said Anathema, going to the pantry and selecting a few herbs along with a good bottle of rosehip oil. "I'm going to ask the water to show us Crowley, and it will."

"It will? Just like that?"

"Well." Anathema shot him a smile. "I _ will _ ask politely."

"Oh. Good." Aziraphale swallowed. "So we will see where Crowley went?"

Anathema nodded as she measured out a few buds of dried lavender into her palm. "We will get a picture of where he is right at this moment. It might not last long, though. It's like trying to get a signal on a faraway radio station sometimes. So we'll have to watch carefully. Note any details. That will help us figure out where he is if you don't recognize it right away."

"Right." Aziraphale took a shuddering breath, squaring his shoulders. "I understand."

A few more bits and pieces cupped in Anathema's palm, then crushed into a fine dust, the crunch of old plants that used to house water and life. Water always looks for water; that was the first thing a witch learns. It was the basis of so many spells. For this one, Anathema scattered the herbs across the surface of the bowl and added a few drops of oil for good measure. 

She asked (very nicely). The water responded. 

An image formed, shimmery in the bowl. Anathema frowned at the picture it presented. It was so dark, she could hardly make out anything. "Aziraphale, do you know where—?" She turned. Froze. 

Tears were streaming down the angel's face. 

"Aziraphale?"

He did not look away from the water. "Yes," he said faintly. "I know precisely where that is."

* * *

Crowley sat slumped in an uncomfortable wooden chair, his hands bound behind his back with demonically strong chains. The two aardvarks had secured him there quite roughly before taking their leave, chatting about what they might do with the rest of their afternoon. Crowley had a few suggestions, but decided to keep them to himself—he was still playing possum. 

He lifted his head once he heard the heavy slam of a door. Now that he was alone, he could take stock of his sorry state. He blinked hard to try and clear his eyes of whatever was trickling into them—blood, most likely from the walloping his head had taken in Soho, and probably sweat. Crowley wasn't often given to sweating, but the circumstances seemed to warrant it. 

The room that held him was dark and dank. Metal walls and floor. Nothing else but him and his chair. The door was not in his line of sight, and Crowley twisted his head around to catch a glimpse of it over his shoulder. 

"Right," he said to himself, facing front again, eyes darting along the bare floor. "Okay."

He'd been afraid of this. Well, not exactly _ this _ but something along these lines. Hell was thorough. Slow to act at times, but they always caught up with you eventually. Crowley struggled against his chains, hissing as the rough iron cut into his thin-skinned wrists. Tears sprang to his naked eyes, and he told himself it was just from the pain. 

Pretty stupid lie, really. Crowley dropped his chin to his chest and gritted his teeth. He was going to die here, he realized. Not discorporated, not kicked around a little. He would be utterly destroyed until not a speck of him remained. Blotted out of the universe entirely. And he would have left behind nothing. 

Only one being in the world would remember him at all—if that. 

His eyes squeezed tight. The need to see Aziraphale stabbed at his gut. Where was he? Was he safe or had they gotten him too? They'd gotten too comfortable, he knew, too foolishly lax. Now look at him. In the end, Crowley was alone.

Totally, irrevocably alone.

"Aziraphale," he sobbed. He allowed himself this one aching moment. Tears dripping from him as his blood did. How stupid he'd been. How daft. Hell was right to wipe him out of existence if this was how he was going to act. 

Crowley took a shuddering breath. Sat up and smashed his face to his shoulder to wipe his tears onto his jacket. Swept all the self-pity away for the moment; bigger worries.

If he was in the Confessional, that meant Hell wanted something. And whatever they wanted to dig out of Crowley, they would have it. It was inevitable. They only needed time, and there was plenty of that in the Pit. 

All Crowley could do was try to last. And hope that Aziraphale, wherever he was, could get to safety in the meantime.

"Shit." He tipped his head back until it knocked against the rough wood of the chairback. Crowley had no real confidence that he could resist Hell's tortures for very long. 

The door creaked open. Crowley forced himself to sit up straight and stare ahead. He knew what was coming. Was intimately familiar with the shape of this torture. After all— 

He was the one who'd invented it.


	2. Chapter 2

"Crowley!" Aziraphale grasped the sides of Anathema's bowl and peered down into the water, the image of Crowley now fading from sight. "Darling, I'm here! Crowley!"

"It's not a two-way street," Anathema said, gently drawing him away from the bowl. "He can't hear you. I'm sorry."

His tears pattered once, twice onto the surface of the clear water. He scrubbed a hand across his eyes. The image of Crowley was already gone, leaving nothing in its wake. "That was Hell," he said. "They've taken him."

"Hell?" Anathema stared into her cereal bowl with all due trepidation. "You recognized it?"

"Yes, I've been there myself." He'd been led past that very room, or perhaps one just like it, before his farce of a trial. Aziraphale wrapped his arms around his middle and slumped into one of the rickety kitchen chairs. "My poor boy. My darling," he murmured, fingertips to his lips. He shuddered to think— No, that could not be the last time he would see Crowley's face. Not that horrid vision of his beloved, battered and mistreated and chained up like an animal. "I have to save him." Aziraphale shot to his feet. "I must go." 

"Go? What do you—?" Anathema pivoted out of the way as Aziraphale brushed past her and began rifling through the pantry. 

"Is there anything in here that could help ward off demons?" He sniffed at a tiny bottle of mysterious origin. "No, I suppose not. Crowley would have told me if he was allergic to anything."

"Wait, hold on." Anathema held up a hand. "You're going to Hell? How? The same way you did before?"

Aziraphale paused in his rummaging to glance over his shoulder. "Ah. No. I'm afraid that's impossible." He pulled himself out of the cupboard and turned, hands clasped tight. "Last time I was in disguise. In Crowley's body, actually."

Anathema said nothing, but her eyebrows spoke volumes. 

"And he was in mine," Aziraphale hastened to say, "dealing with Upstairs." He glanced heavenward with a nervous twitch of his lips. "It was the only way we could survive their punishments, you see." 

"Okay." The witch leaned back against her outdated countertop and crossed her arms over her blouse. "So why not hitch a ride in another demon's body?"

"Out of the question!" Aziraphale's eyes bulged in outrage. "I don't know any other demons, for one. And for another the process is—" He coughed discreetly. "A bit intimate. I'm not even sure it would work for anyone else, save Crowley and myself." 

"Got it. So?" she said, shrugging. "What's the plan? You can't just waltz in there." She paused. "Can you?"

Aziraphale shook his head. "Not undetected. I am an angel, after all." He recalled Michael's entrance during his little bath in the provided holy water. The very air around them had been disturbed by angelic presence. All the demons had noticed, even the ones at the back of the crowd who hadn't seen Michael arrive. It stood to reason that Aziraphale, too, would stick out like a sore thumb without Crowley's body to hide him. He sighed. "Oh, if only I were—" 

He stopped. Looked at Anathema. Looked away. Thought very hard for a moment. Then looked back at her.

"Miss Device," he said, "would you be so kind as to make me human?"

The witch blinked. "Make you what now?" 

* * *

"Hello, Crowley." 

He did not recognize the voice, but forced himself not to turn to see who it belonged to. It didn't matter anyway; would all end up the same. Crowley stared ahead at the wall until the demon slunk by him and stood there, examining him with a curious tilt to their head, gnarled, clawed hands on their hips. They waited. Crowley waited too. They stuck out their chin as if to say _ go on. _ Crowley frowned and shrugged.

"You don't remember me," said the demon with unconcealed hurt. They sighed, pointing at their own goat-like face with one long talon. "Verrier? Signed off when you wanted to requisition those rats?"

Crowley's eyes squinted in panic.

"Issued your commendation for the Inquisition? Fast-tracked your layout for the Bank & Monument station?" 

A vague noise of apology escaped Crowley's lips.

"For Satan's sake, man," Verrier huffed, "I sat right in front when you presented that M25 plan!" 

"Oh, right, _ Verrier_," Crowley said, though in truth his memory was not coming up with anything concrete.

Christ, was there anything more awkward? Ah, right. His imminent torture and destruction. That would certainly count. Crowley's teeth clenched. 

"How've you been? Good old Verrier, I was just thinking about you the other day. What are they up to, I wondered."

"This!" Verrier gestured cheerfully between themself and Crowley's bound form. They shared a laugh (again, false on Crowley's part). "I've been promoted, mate." 

"Yeah? Good on you. Knew you'd climb that ladder. Can't keep Verrier back, that's what I always said." 

"That really means a lot coming from you, Crowley. Truly." Verrier clasped their terrifying hands over their chest. "I've admired your work from the start, you know."

"Ohhh," Crowley demurred, shaking his head.

"No, it's true. You had flair," Verrier said. "A real knack for, what do you call it? Drama." 

"Well." Crowley gave a sheepish shrug. "I mean, 's very kind of you to say so."

"I mean, when word got around that you'd defected…" Verrier's wide smile remained in place, freezing into a cold, sharp edge. "I could hardly believe it. Not Crowley, I said. Crowley-who-was-Crawly? Snakey motherfucker? Are we talking about the same demon?" They shook their shaggy, dripping head. "Just goes to show. You never really know someone, do you?"

The grin slipped from Crowley's face. "Down to business, then?" he asked in a low voice.

Verrier snapped their fingers (no mean feat with claws like that) and a second wooden chair appeared before Crowley. 

"Here's the thing," said Verrier, spinning the chair around and sitting backwards on it. "Ever since Beelzebub cocked up your trial, I've been on easy street. She gets demoted, I take her place. And I'm good at it, Crowley. I enjoy my work. I'd like to keep doing it for a long while, you understand?"

Crowley stared, brow pinched in confusion.

"I'm making you an offer," Verrier elaborated. "No 'good demon, bad demon' horseshit. It's just me, all right? We can avoid all the torture, all the pointless heartache. I get to go back to my bosses with one more feather in my cap and you— Well, you stay in one piece. It's win-win. And all you have to do is—"

"Fuck off," said Crowley amicably. 

Verrier gave him a disappointed look. "See, this is why you never reached a management position, Crowley. No sense of teamwork, that's you."

"You've got that right." Said through bared teeth. 

A deep sigh echoed through the depressing room. "It's your choice, of course. I just don't get it, though. You know you'll tell me sometime down the road, so why not just tell me now?" Verrier leaned closer, tilting his chair on two legs. "How did you do it, Crowley? How did you survive the holy water?"

Crowley spat in their face. 

He'd never done that before, spat at someone. Had always wanted to. The reality, sadly, was not as cathartic as he'd imagined.

Verrier wiped their face with the back of their clawed hand, square pupils widening in hurt. "Why'd you do a thing like that?" he cried. "After all we've been through."

"All we've—! You're about to torture me! Bit pot and kettle, isn't it?"

"Well, if you're going to be petty." Verrier stood. Cracked their horrid knuckles. "Might as well begin." 

Crowley very deliberately did not blink. He was just glad his bound hands were out of sight. They were shaking very badly.

* * *

It was upsetting, actually, how simple it was to make Aziraphale mortal. All it took was a few herbs, a word or two, a certain candle lit and set in a certain direction. Anathema had the whole job done in under an hour, and afterward, Aziraphale was left hollow and panting, his angelic immortality stripped from him not unlike an ear of corn being shucked.

"Are you sure this is a good idea?" asked the witch, helping him back to his feet from where he'd gone to his knees in the back garden. (She hadn't wanted to lose her deposit should something go amiss.) "It's just, you're going to Hell in pretty much the most vulnerable state there is, so…."

"It is risky, I'll admit," gasped Aziraphale, dizzy with the weight of humanity, "but it's my best chance to slip in undetected. Hell is chock full of mortals. They won't notice one more."

"Sure, but—" Anathema dusted off Aziraphale's sleeve. "You'll be in a lot of danger, won't you?" 

"My dear, I would endure far more peril than this to bring Crowley home." He blinked, moving his limbs to test them. Oh, he was sweating. How dreadful. Still, he told himself to be resolute. It was all for Crowley, after all. 

His thoughts and his gaze went far away for a moment, remembering Crowley as he had last seen him. Really seen him. Not in a bowl of water but in the bookshop, their home. The way they had….

"Aziraphale." Anathema rubbed his arm. Her tone indicated she had been speaking for some time without him hearing. 

"Sorry?"

"I said, now what? You can't exactly walk through the front door." She frowned. "Not that there is a front door to Hell."

"Oh, there certainly is," said Aziraphale. "It's in the financial district. I'm afraid I won't be using that entrance. But first things first." He squinted at her. "Do you have any empty jam jars I might borrow?" 

The contents of the cottage were pressed into service as they kitted out Aziraphale for the journey. Newt's old anorak, left on a peg in the hall ever since the weather turned fair that spring, hung a little large on Aziraphale's frame, but that was for the best. It was huge and dark and, with the hood up, it hid his more noticeable features from view. They filled the coat pockets with useful things: a small torch; the jars (once readied); the paring knife from the knife block (the others being far too long to be hidden effectively).

While Anathema was busy at the sink, Aziraphale picked up the spare sunglasses from the table and held them in his hands for a moment. Crowley might want them, he thought, so he slipped them into his inner coat pocket and tried not to dwell on how naked Crowley's eyes had looked in the water.

"Don't forget these," Anathema said, and pressed a package of fig rolls on him. "In case your blood sugar gets low. You are human now, after all." Her smile was oddly touching.

Anathema insisted on accompanying him back to London, which was good because Aziraphale had taken the train to Tadfield in something of a daze and wasn't sure he could have managed the return trip alone. They made their way from Victoria Station to Oxford Circus, where Aziraphale assured Anathema they would find what they were looking for.

"The back door to Hell is in a tube station?" she asked.

"My dear girl," Aziraphale said with a look, "have you ever tried to change trains here during rush hour?" He shuddered and led her further down a connecting hallway. 

Anathema struggled to keep up. The crowds were massive and couldn't seem to decide which side was meant for walking in which direction. She collided with a man speaking loudly into his mobile about how he wouldn't be able to speak into his mobile for much longer because he was going underground. 

"I see your point," she muttered as she came abreast of Aziraphale once more.

The ex-angel fairly floated through the crowds, sidestepping people easily while toying with the gold ring on his little finger. He looked sharply to the right. "Oh dear. Quickly, quickly." He ducked behind a crowd of German tourists, gesturing for Anathema to follow. 

She did so, following his gaze to the tall man in a pale turtleneck striding through the hall, also speaking into his mobile. She squinted. She recognized him. There had been only so many Americans at the end of the world, after all, and Americans tend to find each other fairly easily.

"Yes, almost there," he said into his glass rectangle of a mobile. "If he's not at the shop, I'll try the sushi place. Won't be long. Yes, of course I'm aware—" 

He walked through a knot of commuters and disappeared around a bend, taking his voice with him. 

"So Gabriel has come for me too," Aziraphale muttered. 

"_The _ Gabriel? As in archangel?" asked Anathema. They hadn't exactly introduced themselves at the airfield. "What's he want with you?"

"Likely the same thing Hell wants with Crowley. We should hurry." Aziraphale darted around the tourists and barreled onward. "I've never used this entrance myself," he said, "but Crowley has definitely mentioned it. Oh, I hope it's still in operation."

"Is it like a portal?" Anathema asked. "You walk through it and _ zoom_, you're in Hell?"

"Not quite." Aziraphale made a sharp turn down another, narrower corridor. The crowd was thinner here, but the air was stuffier. "If I remember correctly, Crowley called it," he cleared his throat, "'the long way down.' I shall have to walk."

Anathema's eyebrows danced upward. "You're going to walk all the way, straight into Hell?" 

"Well, the path will be a winding one, I suspect, but— Yes." Aziraphale turned down an even narrower and completely deserted hall, stepping delicately over a high-vis barrier with CAUTION stenciled across the front. "Nearly there."

The door, when they found it, was something of a disappointment. It was just a door. Completely unassuming, no sign at all that it led to the most awful plane of existence imaginable. 

"Are you sure this is it?" Anathema asked.

Aziraphale laid his palm on the metal slab and felt the prickle of unholy pain coming from it. Even in its mortal state, his body recoiled at the unnatural sensation. He jerked his hand away.

"This is it," he said. 

"Well." She turned to him, a proud but worried expression on her face. With efficient hands she turned up the hood of his borrowed coat and fussed with his lapels. "Pace yourself, all right? You're human; you're bound to get tired more easily. Don't go running off at a clip. Stop to rest if you need to."

A wave of fondness for Anathema and all of humanity swept through Aziraphale. As fragile as they were, they knew to look out for one another most of the time, and that was very good. "I will," he promised.

She patted the center of his chest as if saying farewell to his heart. "Good luck, Aziraphale. I hope you find him." 

"So do I," he murmured. He took a deep breath, staring at the door and working up the courage to reach out and grasp the handle.

Anathema watched him closely. "I think it's very brave, what you're doing. You must really love him." She bit her lip, coloring slightly. "I can't even imagine what it must be like."

Aziraphale frowned and turned back to her, delaying the inevitable. "What, being in love?"

"No, I mean— Being together for hundreds, _ thousands _of years?" She ducked her head. "Pretty romantic, I'd say."

"Oh, we haven't—" Aziraphale swallowed. "It's only been since that to-do in Tadfield that the two of us—" He made a vague gesture.

Anathema goggled. "Are you sure? When we first ran into each other, you know, with my bike, I could have sworn—" She shrugged. "'What a sweet couple,' I thought. 'So cozy with each other.'"

"I assure you," said Aziraphale somewhat pink in the cheeks, "it was a rather recent development." 

"How does something like that happen?" asked Anathema. 

"Well." Aziraphale touched the door handle. "The way anything happens, I suppose." He wrenched the door open. They both shivered at the unpleasant miasma that met them. With one last glance at Anathema, he said, "Thank you, my dear. For all your help." 

Aziraphale stepped through, and the door clanged shut behind him.

Inside the dark, damp passageway, Aziraphale switched on his torch, the one so tiny it seemed a child's toy, and danced its weak beam along the stone walls. The path stretched out before him, shrouded in darkness, dripping with an aura of fear.

"I'm coming, Crowley," Aziraphale whispered to himself, picking his way over loose stonework. "Just hold on a little longer, darling. I'm coming for you."

* * *

_ June 2019 _

Aziraphale retrieved the wicker hamper from the boot of the Bentley and watched Crowley's thin, black shape stalking along the lawn of Regent's park, a gingham blanket under his arm as he hunted for just the right spot. Apparently finding one that met with his discerning tastes—half in the shade of a nearby stand of trees, half in the sunlight—Crowley flicked the blanket open and settled it upon the grass like a waiter laying a fine table. 

A smile crept across Aziraphale's face. Who would have thought? The picnic he'd suggested all those years ago was finally happening, now that the world had been saved. 

"What sorts of things have you packed?" he called to Crowley, shutting the boot and lugging the heavy hamper up the kerb toward their spot. 

Crowley's head rose, the sun glinting off his glasses as his eyes found Aziraphale. "Things you like." He took the hamper from him and began to set out the spread.

Aziraphale was fairly sure Crowley had miracled more into the hamper than physics would normally allow. The bounty seemed endless: little golden brown pork pies, a tart of figs and cheese and honey, sausage rolls bursting with caramelized onion, a Victoria sandwich on its own neat white cake stand, a rainbow of crisp vegetables cut into sticks with oodles of interesting things to dip them in, and champagne. So much champagne, cold and beading in the warm summer air, lined up in their ice buckets as if a ball was about to commence. 

"Oh, Crowley." Aziraphale knelt on the red and white gingham blanket and surveyed all that had been laid before him. "It looks absolutely scrumptious." 

"Good," said Crowley, pouring the champagne. (He'd brought actual crystal flutes. Aziraphale's eyes widened, impressed.) "I got a little of everything." He lounged on the blanket like it was a chaise, his long legs marking out its northern boundary. 

"A little?" Aziraphale smiled as he accepted his glass from Crowley. "My dear, you've outdone yourself." Honestly, he'd been half-expecting a selection of shrink-wrapped sandwiches from Tesco, which would have been just fine.

"Well, call it paying you back with interest." The corner of his lips twitched up the way it did when he was very pleased. "I've owed you a picnic for a long time, angel."

Aziraphale's face fell. "Oh, I do hope you don't think you were _ obligated _to—"

"No, I know." Crowley raised his glass, his serpentine eyes peeking above the rim of his shades. "I was only joking."

"Ah. Yes. Quite." Aziraphale raised his glass as well. A nervous flutter worked through his middle as they toasted and drank. He couldn't help but stare at the picture Crowley made sprawled there, easy and relaxed and content. He hoped he wasn't about to ruin that.

"So I know humans have a thing about saving it for the end," Crowley was saying as Aziraphale silently fretted, "but I have a notion we might tuck into this cake first." He stretched a hand toward the hamper's array of cutlery strapped to the inside of the lid, reaching for a knife.

"Before we do that," Aziraphale said, "I have something to give you." He set his flute down on a level piece of earth and willed it not to topple over. 

"A present? For me?" Crowley lit up. His brows arched high above his dark sunglasses. "You didn't have to go to any trouble, angel."

"It wasn't— I mean, I didn't." Aziraphale reached into his suit coat and extracted from its inner pocket a plain cream-colored envelope. He held it in his hands, contemplating the blank face of it. "It's, erm. You see, this letter—"

"Yes?" Crowley prompted. 

Aziraphale thrust the envelope at him. "Please open it later, dear boy. When you're alone. I don't wish to— That is, it's meant for you to read tonight. After you've given me a lift home, for example." 

Crowley eyed the letter with great suspicion. He did not reach out to touch it. "Why?" he asked.

"It's difficult to explain," Aziraphale pleaded. He thrust the letter even more. "All will be clear when you read it. I think. I hope."

Crowley sat up straighter and pushed his sunglasses atop his head. "Aziraphale," he said, eyes blazing in the sun, "is something wrong?"

"No, nothing!" Aziraphale gulped. The letter wavered in his hand. "Everything is positively—" 

"Don't. Say it." Crowley held up a finger. A beat. "You're sure?"

"Yes. It's nothing, really. Just, please. Take it."

Crowley stared at him a moment longer before taking the letter gingerly between his thumb and forefinger. Aziraphale breathed a sigh of relief once it was out of his grasp. There. He'd done it. Whatever happened next was up to— Well, Crowley. 

Determined to squeeze every last drop of joy from this day, Aziraphale mustered a warm smile. "Now, shall I serve you a slice of that sponge?" he asked brightly. He turned to the hamper to select the correct knife, chattering all the while. "I do hope there's a good bit of jam. I enjoy a healthy portion myself; of course, one doesn't wish to go overboard and make things too sickly. Such a delicate balance, these things." He carved a thick wedge and transferred it to a dainty china plate. "Is that too much for you, my dear, or do you think you can manage to—?" He turned back to hand Crowley the cake.

And nearly dropped it when he saw Crowley was tearing open the envelope.

"Crowley!" He hastened to put down his knife and plate, but there wasn't a lot of free space on the blanket for them. "I told you not to read that until later!"

"I heard you," said Crowley, "but I've decided I'd rather read it now." His deft fingers plucked the thick cardstock from its sheath. 

"No!" Aziraphale made a grab for the letter but Crowley twisted out of his reach. "Crowley, you mustn't!"

"Why not?" That sharp chin jutted stubbornly. "It's my letter now. You gave it to me as a present so I can do what I like with it."

Aziraphale lunged for him, but Crowley used his shoulder as a barrier and held the letter out at arm's length, which, as long as Crowley's arms were, was well out of Aziraphale's reach. "You're being very childish, Crowley!"

"_I _ am? You're the one acting all cloak and dagger!" Crowley scrambled to his feet, leaving Aziraphale to overbalance and nearly fall into the fig tart. 

"Argh! Come back here!" Aziraphale clawed his way upright, red-faced. 

Crowley danced out of the way again, nimble on his feet where Aziraphale was slow, slow, always too slow for him. Tears sprang to his eyes at the thought, and he stopped trying to get hold of Crowley, standing there in the middle of the park, hot with embarrassment. 

Not realizing the game was over, Crowley ran a few paces toward the trees and unfurled the paper, clearing his throat for a dramatic reading.

"My dearest Crowley," he said in a mocking rendition of Aziraphale's voice, "I wanted to give you the courtesy of this letter which, without me as an audience, might give you privacy in which to absorb what I have to say. I needn't mention that you are my oldest friend, my most cherished companion, and after the near-disaster that we've survived, I've decided I can't possibly go another day without telling you…" Crowley trailed off. He stopped his prancing and peered closer at the letter. "Telling you how much you mean to me." His yellow eyes snapped up and caught Aziraphale in their bright gaze.

"You don't—" Aziraphale swallowed, miserable. "You don't need to read it aloud, do you?"

"I— Suppose not," Crowley said. He ducked his head and read the rest of the letter in silence, his eyes tracking along the paper. Long minutes ticked by as he took in the words Aziraphale had spent all night composing, tossing crumpled drafts into the wastebasket, editing the letter down to its bones, striking out line after superfluous line until all that was left was—

Crowley looked up, mouth open. "You're in love with me?"

"Yes." Aziraphale managed a watery smile. "Isn't it awful?"

"Oh, angel." Crowley's arms fell to his sides, the damned letter still clutched in one hand. "Sorry. I didn't mean to—"

Aziraphale waved him away. He would _ not _ cry. He would not spoil this day any more than it already was. "It's fine, of course. Rather silly of me. If we could forget the whole thing, I would appreciate it, my— Crowley." His tongue tripped on the last bit. Best lay off the 'dears' for awhile, he thought.

Crowley was fast, always had been. Now he moved faster than Aziraphale could fathom, standing right in front of him in less than an eyeblink, lips parted in wonder as he stared into his shocked face. Aziraphale could see himself reflected perfectly in the black circles of Crowley's glasses, still perched on his head.

"Do you know why I packed six bottles of champagne?" he murmured.

Aziraphale tried to think. "To get us very drunk, I expect."

Crowley smiled a little and ducked his head. "I reckoned once we were both nice and mellow, and if the weather cooperated, and if the food was good, and the company was better, I might finally get up the nerve to tell you that I—" He sighed, fingers fidgeting with the letter.

"Tell me what?" Aziraphale whispered. Hope flowered in his chest.

Crowley looked up, glow-yellow eyes shining. "That I've loved you for an age." His gaze dropped to Aziraphale's mouth. "That I want you. That it's all I think about these days, and it's more than I can stand, it's—"

Aziraphale didn't wait a moment more. He leaned in and captured Crowley's lips against his, swallowing down the little thrill-want cry off his tongue, tasting champagne, cold and crisp, and Crowley, warm, warm, warm. The letter fluttered to the grass. Crowley's arms went around him, and he held onto Crowley in turn, and they did not part for a long while.

The ants plundered a good portion of the picnic food. The angel and the demon didn't seem to notice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for coming on this ride, y'all. This has been a bit of a week....month....year? And I suppose this is the story I wanted to tell about that. It means a lot to me to share it <3
> 
> Anyway, we're just getting started.


	3. Chapter 3

Crowley tried to count his breaths. Up to ten, then back again. He tried to remember that if he could breathe, that meant he was alive. He tried to remember why that mattered. 

Verrier finished chaining him to the wall, then stood back to admire their handiwork. It was a classic pose, really, arms above his head, legs spread. The X of his body marking the place where he would be taken apart. 

"How's that?" Verrier asked, jiggling at a chain. "Want a little more slack?"

It might have been a joke, but it just as easily could have been sincere. It wasn't physical pain they were after, Crowley knew. It was something much, much worse.

He stayed silent, his head hanging. Counted up to ten. Started back at one. Sweat beaded at his temples and ran down his neck.

Verrier took a step closer, their voice pitched low. "Come on, Crowley. I hate to see you like this, I really do. Just tell me now instead of later, yeah?"

Crowley stared at the floor. Breathed. He was alive. It mattered because— Because— 

"Is it that angel?" Verrier asked. "Is he the reason you won't talk?" 

Aziraphale's name flashed through his mind, and Crowley couldn't help but picture his face, recall the sound of his voice. His jaw ticked. Steady, he told himself.

"I reckon your little trick had something to do with him." Verrier's sigh gusted through the dank room. "Doesn't seem worth it. Letting yourself be torn to pieces, and for what?" They shook their shaggy head. "Some stupid low-level angel."

Crowley's eyes slid shut, his breath coming too fast. He lost his place in the counting. He tried to concentrate on Aziraphale's name instead. Spelled it out in his head over and over. 

"I heard the two of you were shacked up on Earth like a couple of mortals," Verrier scoffed. "Downright disgusting, that is." They put their fanged mouth up against Crowley's ear to whisper, "Does he let you fuck him? Is that all it took? One sweet little slice of heaven and you're under his thumb for eternity?"

Crowley jerked his head aside, chains jangling. Verrier laughed to see him squirm.

"Well, like I said." They patted Crowley on his aching shoulder. "Your choice, doing it this way." Verrier strode over to the door and opened it, glancing back at Crowley with their goat-eyes. 

"Won't be long, I expect," Verrier said, and then shut the door.

Leaving Crowley alone.

Alone. With his thoughts. 

* * *

_ September 2019 _

Crowley collapsed facedown into the bunched bedsheets, the length of him unraveled. He pressed into his pillow to soak up the sweat and, yes, the tears. Behind him, Aziraphale made a contented, loving sound. His hips still pumped away, but slower, less urgently now that they'd both come off. 

"Darling," he murmured. He folded to kiss a spot on Crowley's back, the point that would've been between his wings if he'd gotten them out.

(He had got them out, in fact, earlier that evening. Aziraphale had bent him over the desk in Crowley's study and nibbled on his ear. Not in front of the plants, Crowley had joked, and Aziraphale had laughed and fucked him until black feathers burst through the air to hide them from sight.)

They didn't often come back to Crowley's flat; the bookshop was so comfortable for Aziraphale, and Crowley didn't mind it. But that night they'd gone to a new restaurant in Berkeley Square, and afterwards, tipsy on cocktails and each other's sly glances, they'd agreed to retire to the flat since it was so much closer.

Aziraphale pulled his softening cock from Crowley's tender body. The used, wet feeling that followed was sort of wonderful, Crowley thought. He closed his eyes and basked for a few long moments. His further burrowing into the pillow did not go unnoticed.

"Do you miss your luxury bed linens, my dear?" Aziraphale stretched out against Crowley's flank, chin propped on a fist. "We can bring them back to my place if you prefer."

"Mm, nah." Crowley rolled his shoulders. That good ache that came from holding himself on hands and knees while Aziraphale took him from behind—nothing like it. "I like your sheets. They smell of you."

Was it calculated to draw that sunshine-smile from Aziraphale? It was true either way. 

"You old romantic," Aziraphale whispered, reaching out to comb Crowley's mussed hair with his thick fingers. "What do I smell like?"

Crowley pretended to think. "Eh, your cologne, obviously. Old paper, ink. That glue you use for bookbinding." He raised his head and captured Aziraphale's lips with his own until the kiss ran its course. "Expensive spices. Your fussy teas," he murmured into the millimeter of space between their mouths. "Warm. You just smell warm, angel."

Those blue eyes went even softer. Impossible, but there it was. "Oh, darling." He kissed Crowley again, and again, until the kisses turned to nips, into a suckle of Crowley's lower lip. They kissed for a long while before rolling onto their sides. Aziraphale's hands, never idle, found Crowley's seed-slick hole. 

Crowley arched into it. "Angel, yes," he said in the dark.

"Are you certain?" His fingers were already tucking into the well-fucked wetness of him. "I'm afraid I'm rather insatiable tonight. We don't need to, again—" 

"Yes we do," Crowley growled, and bit at Aziraphale's neck to urge him on. 

It had taken him six thousand years to get this angel into his bed, and to his mind, every moment they could be fucking and weren't was a travesty. Perhaps in a couple of centuries, the driving need to get Aziraphale's bare skin against his wouldn't be so dire. It might taper off the way summer cools into autumn, and then Crowley would be content just holding Aziraphale's hand when they walked in the park, or laying together on the sofa in the back room of the bookshop, or chatting across a table over tea and coffee. For now, though, it was still so new. So precious. Some nights, Crowley could barely believe it was real, that he was allowed to touch Aziraphale. To be held by him. It was Heaven, of a kind, the only sort Crowley would ever know now.

He hissed as Aziraphale nudged his cock back inside him, just the flared head, just a gentle rock against his body. The two of them, clinging, Crowley's leg looped over Aziraphale's hip. A needy sound dripped from Crowley's mouth as Aziraphale fucked in deeper.

"Desperate for it, aren't we?" Soft lips brushed his temple. The crown of his head. "Will it ever be enough?"

"Just fill me up," Crowley gasped. "Please, I want it."

His face was buried in Aziraphale's shoulder just as Aziraphale's cock was now buried in him, and he was shocked to feel the fingers in his hair tighten and pull—insistent—until his head was brought upright. He stared at Aziraphale, their eyes meeting in the darkness and locking there. 

"Don't look away." His gaze held some strange promise, a depth that Crowley could hardly bear. "I'll give it all to you, only stay with me."

Crowley wanted to do as Aziraphale asked, he really did, but the intensity, the heat of that angelic stare— It was overwhelming. He gave a choked off sound and tried to tuck his face back into the cavern of Aziraphale's throat. 

Aziraphale tugged at his hair again. "No, no, no," he tutted. "Stay here, come on. Show me those gorgeous eyes of yours."

Crowley allowed himself to be coaxed back into their stare-off, swallowing hard. He looked into Aziraphale's strangely colored eyes, had no choice but to allow himself to be studied in turn. It made him feel hot all over. A squirming fear just under his skin, as if any moment Aziraphale would see him—really see him—all his foibles and mistakes, the invisible scars from a war long past, the thing he was at his core. Stripped of every countermeasure. His secrets, all laid bare. 

"S'too much," he whispered at last as his eyes slid shut. "Angel, I'm sorry, you're— I can't."

He was shaking. Through every thrust of Aziraphale's cock, he was shaking apart. 

"Crowley, oh, my darling." Aziraphale let go of his hair and touched his face. "It's all right. We don't need to…." His hips stopped moving as he held Crowley close. 

"No, don't." Crowley scrabbled at Aziraphale's back, nails marking out tracks on his skin. "Don't you stop," sobbed into his shoulder.

"You're sure?" Already he was thrusting again, and faster.

"I am, I'm so close—" And it was true, all of a sudden.

Sweat and soft cries. Aziraphale's body atop his. Crowley came, though he tried to hold it at bay. Came between their bellies, coating them in another layer of seed. Aziraphale followed not long after with a kiss to Crowley's ear and a long, low groan. 

Later, when they'd caught their breath, they lay in each other's arms amid the cool, silky sheets. Crowley dozed while Aziraphale trailed careful fingertips up and down his skin. Counting ribs, cataloging freckles. 

"Shall I clean you up now, darling?" he asked as his hand skated through a pool of come in the crease of Crowley's thigh. "We've made such a mess." 

"Leave it," he grunted, flopping even more into Aziraphale's warm embrace. "Feels nice. Filthy." 

Aziraphale hummed as he journeyed along a thin, pale arm. His voice, when he finally spoke again, was quiet. "I can't fathom it sometimes, you know. That this is real. That I can make love to you like this."

"Yeah," Crowley agreed just as quietly. 

They kissed. Soft in the dark. 

"It's a miracle," Aziraphale murmured. "We have everything we've ever wanted. Everything we need, right here." He squeezed Crowley's narrow hip. "I never thought I could be this happy. Isn't it amazing, darling? Doesn't it just dazzle you?"

Crowley hesitated. A half of a blink, just the tiniest pause. 

"It does," he said. And he looked away into a shadowy corner, unable to hold Aziraphale's gaze any longer. 

Aziraphale, languid from lovemaking, did not seem to notice. "What a perfect world. And it's ours." 

"Mhm." Crowley sunk into Aziraphale, his face hiding again against his neck. "Perfect."

Eventually, Aziraphale dozed. Under Crowley's tutelage he'd been making an attempt at sleep just to see what the fuss was about, and he was getting rather good at it. Crowley, meanwhile, found that he could not sleep a wink. 

He wriggled out of Aziraphale's arms and sat up in bed, his knees making mountain peaks beneath the sheets. He rested one arm across their points, raked the other hand through his hair. The mess on his stomach and between his legs had become uncomfortably sticky, so he willed it away with a snap. 

There was one huge picture window along the bedroom wall that looked out onto the London skyline, a vast twinkling landscape that culminated in the circle of red dots: the Eye always watching him. Crowley slipped out of bed and padded naked across the glossy concrete floor. He leaned one forearm against the glass and stared out into the night. He could see the reflection of Aziraphale in bed behind him, the bedclothes rising and falling the merest inch with his breathing. 

Crowley watched the Eye as it turned in the black sky, unblinking and constant. He used to think God was like that. Always watching him. Keeping tabs after the Fall, witnessing his every sin. Now he was fairly sure she wasn't watching. Never had, probably. A hollow comfort, to be free from scrutiny, to know she didn't actually give a shit.

And no one, not God, not Aziraphale, knew that he— Crowley sighed. His breath made dew against the glass.

He was such a fucking liar. It had begun as a lie of omission but now…. He should have said something by now.

But he hadn't. And he wouldn't.

No point in being maudlin about it, Crowley thought. What good would it do anyone to dwell on things that were out of his control? Aziraphale was happy; he'd said so. He was floating in a cloud of absolute bliss. 

What they had was more than Crowley could ever hope for; he wouldn't dare hope for more.

The Eye turned. And Crowley did not sleep.

* * *

Aziraphale was getting close to Hell. He could feel it, a hot, horrible stench rising ahead of him. The beam of his torch flickered and went out, giving way to darkness as thick as toffee. Aziraphale tapped his palm against the blasted torch, trying to eke out a little more light, but it stayed dim. 

"Damn it anyway," he murmured, and discarded it on the murky path. 

He continued on at a slow, bumbling pace. One hand against the rough stone wall, fingertips straying through damp and grime. Aziraphale grimaced. If he had found himself in this situation, say, a little over a year ago when he still felt the might of Heaven behind him in all things, perhaps he would have felt a bit braver. As it was, he felt very small and very alone. His mortal heart beat in his chest like a wild creature. Sped when he thought of Crowley tied to that chair and all the awful things his fellow demons might be doing to him at that precise moment. 

"I'm not leaving you behind, Crowley," Aziraphale whispered to himself. The words gave him strength even if Crowley couldn't hear them. "I won't go home without you." 

He took another step into shadow. The ground was not there to meet his foot, and Aziraphale pitched forward with a yelp. He tumbled head over feet down a steep incline, landing in a heap at the bottom. Silence then, only the click of pebbles following. Aziraphale at last stirred and groaned. He felt wet. He thrust his hands into his anorak pockets. Slivers of glass bit into his fingers, and he hissed. His precious jars of holy water, filled from the font of St. Cecilia's outside of Tadfield. All shattered, save one. Aziraphale wrapped his good hand round it and held it gingerly to his breast as he rose to his feet. 

He shook out the pockets of his damp coat, casting broken glass on the ground. The fig rolls had survived, thank goodness. Aziraphale opened the packet and chewed on one as he picked his way onward, heading into the sulfuric heat and hoping it was the right direction. 

It soon became clear to Aziraphale that he was on a sort of ramp that spiraled downward. His shoes crunched as he walked, and he squinted in the darkness to find the path littered with bones. He tried to make a prayer of apology for each one he stepped on, but there were just too many. He walked a long while, long past the point where all the fig rolls were eaten. Long enough that his coat dried a bit and his feet began to ache. 

He knew he was in Hell proper when he heard the noise: the great constant moan of the damned. The writhing mass appeared before him in the dim fluorescent lighting of a corporate Pit, and Aziraphale wasted no time. He tugged his hood over his head and slipped into the crowd, one of millions of mortal souls lost to sin. 

"Now if I remember correctly," he murmured as he shambled along with the others, "I need to go several levels down before— Oh, pardon me," he said to a human who had elbowed him. 

The damned soul gave Aziraphale a dirty look and carried on. 

"Rather unkind," Aziraphale remarked. 

"That's sort of the idea, laddie," said a familiar voice behind him. "It's Hell, after all."

That can't be, thought Aziraphale. He turned and saw it was. "Mr Shadwell? What are you doing here?" 

The gnarled old man scowled and gave a half-shrug. "Tha's what I'd like to know. I'm still trying to sort out the paperwork. What are _ you _ doing here, ya pansy?"

It became clear in that moment that Mr Shadwell, who had lived a life of prejudice and deceit, had never sought to correct his behavior or atone for his misdeeds. Being tangentially related to the saving of the human race didn't mean much when you had no idea what you were doing. It wasn't all that surprising, then, to find him here. 

Aziraphale pulled him off to the side in the crowded hall, the nearest to privacy they could manage. "I'm looking for Crowley," he whispered. "He's been captured. Can you show me the way to the cells? They're far below, if I remember correctly."

Shadwell squinted at him suspiciously. "Mr Crowley's died? Ah." He took his ratty cap from his head. "Gone too soon. Just like his father."

"What? No, no, Crowley doesn't have a— He's a demon!" Aziraphale cried. Then, quieting back to a whisper, "Somewhat reformed, of course."

"Is he?" Shadwell mulled that over for a moment. "Hrm. Didn't know that."

"Yes you do! You saw him perform otherworldly feats at the airfield!"

Shadwell looked at him blankly.

"He stopped time! Don't you remember?"

"Ehhhhh." Shadwell shrugged. "To be honest, it was all a bit of a blur." 

"Well, trust me. He's a demon," Aziraphale sighed. 

A bushy eyebrow quirked. "Then he's in the proper place, isn't he?"

"Absolutely not!" At Aziraphale's raised voice, a few shambling souls glared sharply in his direction. With a gulp, Aziraphale felt in his coat pocket for something that might aid in his disguise. He found Crowley's sunglasses mercifully intact and slipped them on before hissing at Shadwell, "It's a long story, one I'm not sure you'd understand. Now please, can you show me the way?"

"Aye, I can," said Shadwell. "I've made a circuit of the whole place ten times over at this point. I know my way 'round. I can help you find yer..." He curled his lip in distaste. "Boyfriend, or whatever you call 'im."

"Good." Aziraphale straightened, trying a smile on for size. His luck was finally changing for the better. "You shall be my Virgil, then."

"Not on yer life!" Shadwell squawked. "I'll not be your Molly or your Mary or your—" 

"No, it means— Oh, nevermind." Aziraphale tugged him by the sleeve, leading them through the crowd. "Hurry, we must find him."

* * *

_ February 2020 _

Aziraphale exhaled, watching his breath mist in front of his lips. It was so lovely. Made him feel very cozy in his camel coat and tartan muffler. He didn't need the winter togs to stay warm, of course, but walking about the city in shirtsleeves when there was a dusting of snow still on the ground would have drawn curious stares. He turned to Crowley, who looked resplendent in his long black coat and gunmetal scarf, and smiled. 

Crowley caught his look and slid his gloved hand into Aziraphale's, black and cream leather twining as their fingers laced. 

"You look rather pleased with yourself," he observed. 

"Well, there has been quite a lot of fuss over this show." Aziraphale steered them around a knot of tourists on the pavement and crossed over to the lane that would lead them down the side of the National Gallery. "I'm looking forward to it. I can't remember the last time we saw something on the West End, do you?"

"Been busy, I suppose." Crowley lifted their hands to his lips and gave Aziraphale's gloved knuckles a quick peck. "Where do you want to go afterwards? Drinks or—?"

He stopped suddenly, his eyes flickering side to side behind his dark glasses. Aziraphale stopped as well—couldn't help it, with their hands clasped like they were.

"Something the matter, darling?" 

"I'm feeling something," Crowley murmured. "You know how you can sense love? It's like that, but the opposite."

"What, hatred?"

"No, not that. Hatred's not the opposite of love, funny enough." Crowley squinted down the lane. "It's fear. A big, fat slice of it up ahead."

"Oh my. Should we—?" Aziraphale tugged him by the hand, and together they walked into Trafalgar Square. Even in this freezing weather, it was teeming with people. Dozens of humans were strolling along or sitting on the lip of the great, empty fountains or climbing the icy plinth beneath Nelson. Aziraphale stared into the crowds, searching for something out of the ordinary. "It could be any one of them, couldn't it?"

He turned to find Crowley looking off to the right, his gaze fastened on something Aziraphale had not noticed: a little child sitting on the steps. 

"It's her," Crowley said, quiet. 

Aziraphale watched the small girl closely. From behind, she seemed quite normal. "Where are her parents? My word, is she all alone?" He took a step towards the child, but his hand was still in Crowley's, and Crowley did not move to follow. Aziraphale jerked back into place with Crowley as his anchor. He furrowed his brow. "Darling, come now, we can't just leave her like that."

Crowley's face, normally inscrutable enough with his glasses, seemed to be carved from stone. "Not sure we should stick our noses in," he said. 

A huff made another white cloud in the air in front of Aziraphale's lips. "I may no longer be in Heaven's employ," he said, "but that does not mean I will stand idly by while there are mortals who need assistance." He gave Crowley a firm enough yank to unbalance him, dragging him across the pavement and down the steps. Crowley did not fight him, thankfully.

When they reached the girl, Aziraphale saw she was crying. Tears were rolling down her miserable face, a proper blubber. It was difficult to say—he wasn't very good at guessing human ages—but she seemed no older than six or seven years old. 

"Excuse me, my dear," said Aziraphale, dropping Crowley's hand to squat down to eye level with the child, "are you lost?"

The girl nodded, her long braids bouncing. Still she did not speak, looking warily between Aziraphale and Crowley, who loomed darkly over them. 

"It's all right." Aziraphale touched her chilled hands and projected a wave of angelic warmth and comfort at her. "Tell me what happened. Perhaps I can help."

Another tear rolled down the girl's cheek. "I was walking with my mum," she said in a high, fluttery voice. "I came over to look at the birds. I thought she was right behind me, but when I turned around she was gone." She shook her head. "M'not sure where she went. I tried going that way—" She pointed toward Embankment. "—and that way—" Up Charing Cross. "But I couldn't find her and I got tired and…." She cried some more. "Mum told me you can't trust policemen, so I don't know what to do."

Crowley's mouth worked. "Well, she's got a point."

"There, there," Aziraphale said. "We'll find your mother." Already he was reaching out with his angelic spirit, feeling for flashes of love—the desperate sort that a parent might project upon realizing they've lost sight of their child. Yes, he could feel her quite clearly up on Tottenham Court Road. He looked to Crowley as he stood. "Stay with her, darling."

"Me? But—" Crowley leaned in to whisper. "Shouldn't I go fetch the mum? She's reeking of fear, I'm sure. Won't take me a minute."

"I've already located her." Aziraphale concentrated. The woman was moving quickly in the exact wrong direction. He had to hurry. "Please, Crowley, just watch her for a moment. I won't be long." He dropped a quick kiss to Crowley's cheek and, with a reassuring smile directed at both his demon and the little child, he bustled away. 

It was not difficult to find the lady. She was positively awash in love, rushing through the evening crowds on the pavement, calling the little girl's name. "Bridgette! Bridgette, where are you?" 

Aziraphale took the worried mother by the elbow. "Bridgette is quite safe. If you would come with me, madam." There was a spirit of calm that he could exude in moments like this. It was very convenient when dealing with humans. Bridgette's mother trusted him instantly, and together they walked back toward the Column.

The sight that greeted them in Trafalgar Square was a surprising one. The little girl, who had been so teary moments ago was now transformed into a laughing, smiling sprite. She sat on the lip of one of the empty fountains beside Crowley, who was amusing her by pointing at passersby and using his demonic powers to make them stumble. One very snooty-looking man talking loudly on his mobile actually fell face-first into a pile of snow, and Bridgette howled with good cheer.

Crowley was grinning down at the delighted little girl, but when he looked up and saw Aziraphale approaching, his face shuttered with an odd mix of emotions that Aziraphale had never seen there. He didn't have time to question it, however, what with all the commotion. 

"Sweetheart!" cried the mother as she ran the last few yards. 

The little girl's face lit up even further. "Mummy! Look, Mister Crowley is showing me how to do magic! Real, proper magic!" 

The woman was not listening, too preoccupied with hugging her child as tight as she could. "I was so worried, oh my God." Over the tops of their heads, Aziraphale gave Crowley a look. 

The demon shrugged, glancing at his last victim, who was dusting the snow from his trousers. "No harm done. Barely a scrape on them." As if these silly pranks were the only reason for Crowley's guilty countenance. Aziraphale was not so sure this was the case.

Aziraphale also noted that Bridgette was bundled up in Crowley's long grey scarf, which was looped around her tiny neck half a dozen times. He softened at that, and when he glanced back at Crowley, Crowley seemed suddenly interested in the architecture of the Gallery behind them. 

"I don't know how to thank you," the mother was saying, Bridgette perched on her hip. "How did you know where—?"

"And goodbye." Aziraphale snapped his fingers. The woman's eyes went all glazed. "The next thing you'll know, you'll have found your child yourself safe and sound, hm? Such a relief."

"And all manner of things will be well," Crowley drawled behind him. 

"Get your scarf, darling." Aziraphale consulted his pocket watch and tsked. "We've missed the start of the show. Do you want to try and catch the second act?" He turned to Crowley only to find Crowley re-arranging his scarf more securely about the curious child's neck. 

"Is mummy asleep?" she asked. (Aziraphale hadn't felt it necessary to work any miracles on her own memory. Children often remembered all sorts of strange things that no one ever believed.) 

"Just another bit of magic," Crowley told her. "You warm enough?"

"Oh yes. Can I keep it?" she asked, playing with one tasseled end. 

Crowley gave Aziraphale a questioning look. The angel sighed and said to the dazed mother, "You'll have found your child and, erm, have bought her a fetching new scarf." 

"Yay!" 

"Off you pop. There we are." Aziraphale gently guided the woman down the steps and out of the square, where she blinked before carrying on as if nothing unusual had happened at all. The angel watched them go with a tilt of a smile. The dark shape of Crowley, now sans neckwear, slouched beside him. 

"Forget the play," Crowley said. "Think I'd rather we just go home." He pushed his fingertips under his glasses and rubbed at his eyes.

Aziraphale frowned. "Are you all right? You sound a bit tired."

"Playing babysitter takes a lot out of you." This was said in an offhand way, but there was a tension in Crowley's jaw that Aziraphale had not seen since the world was ending.

"My dear, you played babysitter to little Warlock for years," Aziraphale reminded him. 

"That was a _ job_." The near-snarl in his voice startled Aziraphale. "I did what I had to do."

"Of course." He hesitated, hoping the gentle teasing might tease Crowley gently open. "You must be out of practice, then."

"Must be," he said, already turning to go back the way they came. "Split a bottle of something for dinner?" A very casual suggestion, but the tremor in his voice betrayed something that Aziraphale couldn't decipher.

"That would be fine." Aziraphale frowned and caught up to Crowley's long-legged walk.

They didn't hold hands on the way back. His fingers itched to know why.


	4. Chapter 4

Torture in Hell used to be less subtle. Hot pokers in places they shouldn't be. Sharp knives. Things that crushed and squished and pulled and tore. Very messy, the whole thing, and it required a large staff of torturers to keep it going. 

It'd never sat well with Crowley. He wasn't one for violence. Light mischief, sure, annoyances that piled up into a miserable existence, fine. But spilling blood had always seemed so...ham-fisted to him. Inelegant. Crass.

He'd been the one to suggest the updates to the Confessional. Simple, really. He knew how mortals ticked; he'd watched them aboveground for years, after all. Leave one alone for long enough with no distractions and the poor bastard would torture himself. Isolation was worse than any rack or thumbscrew. It had the added benefit of freeing up staff for other demonic projects, which had impressed Beelezbub at the time. Before long, the policy of 'bloodless torture' had proven itself just as effective, if not more so, than the traditional methods, and Hell chucked out its supply of Iron Maidens in favor of—

Well. Rooms like this one.

Crowley looked over the dull, dank place. From his spot chained to the wall, he could see nothing of interest. Just the two wooden chairs, the shut door. He'd thought he was doing the humans a kindness, convincing his bosses to leave behind the old ways. Naturally, he was now regretting his choices. 

When would he ever learn? He groaned and pressed his face into his aching arm. Aziraphale would say something about Evil carrying the seeds of its own destruction if he were here.

Which he wasn't. 

How much time had passed since Verrier had shut the door? Impossible to say. Not only because there was no clock, no sunlight, not even a puddle growing wider with drips from the ceiling with which to measure the passage of time, but because time worked differently in the Confessional. An hour outside its walls might actually be a year to its occupant. The torture could stretch across lifetimes. And yet time could also be compressed; a comforting thought might last no more than a moment despite how long and hard one tried to think of it. 

No one's mind—human or otherwise—was built to withstand such a thing. With nothing else to do, it would twist in on itself, play tricks, go mad. What's worse, Crowley was unique among demons. He had an imagination. 

He was not looking forward to seeing what it conjured.

Crowley tried once more to slip his thin wrists from the manacles. He'd watched enough cable television to know it was possible if he snapped some bone in his hand, but he wasn't sure which one and he had no idea how he might do it.

With a grunt, he gave it another go. Not much else to do except go slowly insane. 

"Oh, my dear," said a voice much too close. "You poor thing."

Crowley froze, his gaze still locked above his head. His breathing sped up without his consent. 

"So that's how it's going to be, is it?" he murmured. He shut his eyes briefly, steeling himself, then opened them to see Aziraphale standing before him, a soft creamy glow in the middle of the darkest pits of Hell. 

"Hello darling," he said.

Crowley sighed. "I know you're not real."

Aziraphale tipped his head in answer. He was dressed as Crowley had last seen him: coat and hat to ward off the rain. "True," said the vision. "I suppose your mind is beginning to break, then."

"Guess so." Crowley went limp in his chains, trying to affect a sort of relaxed lean against the wall. "Well, we knew it was coming."

The lie that looked like Aziraphale smiled gently. "We certainly did." He picked up one of the wooden chairs and set it in front of Crowley, moving just the way the real Aziraphale would, dusting off the seat with a handkerchief before sitting down with his hands politely nestled in his lap. He seemed content to wait.

Crowley huffed. "This is such a cliche," he said with a shake of his head. "'Course it's you. 'Course this is what I see when I start to crack. It's like something out of a bad film, isn't it? I suppose you'll start in on me soon, hm? Telling me how shit I am, how I deserve this, how it was always going to end with me back here. The big, emotional showdown."

"I don't think I need to go through that whole song and dance, darling," not-Aziraphale said. He looked over Crowley the way the real Aziraphale might eye a particularly impolite human pushing forward in a will-call queue. Cool, detached judgment. "You seem to be doing a fine job of it all by yourself."

Crowley raised his head and gave his best glare. "I'm not going to tell them how I did it. I might go stark raving, and maybe I won't have a choice at that point, but while I can still think for myself, I won't talk."

"Ah, yes." The phantom crossed his ankles. "All to protect me."

"You're not real," Crowley reminded him. 

"I'm real enough to hold a conversation." The pale head tipped curiously. "Do you think I'll know what you did here? That you tried to be brave before the end?" His gaze flicked over Crowley. "My hero," he said with the beginnings of acid on his lips. 

"Aziraphale will know." Crowley nodded to himself. "He'll understand."

"Like I _ always _ do?" Not-Aziraphale laughed bitterly. "I don't understand you at all. Not after what's happened." He shook his head. "I'm not even sure I can love you anymore, Crowley."

"Shut up," Crowley growled. "You're not real. You're a figment."

"I tried, darling. But you know you're not easy to love. And now I'm afraid I must admit defeat." His eyes were clear and kind. Just like Aziraphale's. "You won't hold it against me, will you? You understand, surely? I did my best." It was the gentleness in the voice that did it. That pierced Crowley through.

Crowley ground his teeth together. "I'm just going mad, that's all. This is just the part where all the stuff I've got boiling inside comes pouring out. It's not real, it's just fear."

"Oh, poor darling," said the figment. "There's nothing more real than that."

"Shut _ up_!" he snarled, thrashing once, shutting his eyes tight. "Shut up, you stupid, idiotic—" He bit down on his tongue. Breathe in, out. Up to ten. Back again.

He hung from his chains for in silence, bracing himself for the ghost's retort, but when it didn't come, he opened his eyes and saw he was alone. 

"Aziraphale?" he called, small and weak. No, it had never been Aziraphale. He shook in his bonds. It wasn't Aziraphale.

But hadn't the real Aziraphale abandoned him too?

In the dark of the Confessional, his sobs went unanswered, echoing back to him as time stretched like taffy.

* * *

_ Yesterday _

Aziraphale was trying to tidy up. Trying, unsuccessfully, to coax Crowley into lending a hand. Though the bookshop and its dusty back rooms were miraculously endowed with enough space to keep its owner comfortable, ever since Crowley had more or less made himself at home here, Aziraphale was finding it difficult to keep the place in order.

Not clean, really. Just...ordered. In the fashion that pleased Aziraphale. He did not mind piles of his own papers and books and knick knacks lying about because to him their arrangement made a sort of sense. Crowley's way of sprinkling his possessions through their shared home, though, was starting to get on his nerves. Earlier that morning, Aziraphale had found a half-empty bottle of Macallan 12 shoved into a pigeonhole in his writing desk. It was the angel's opinion that liquor belonged in or at least near the liquor cabinet—a notion that Crowley couldn't seem to comprehend.

"Darling," Aziraphale called downstairs. He'd been laboring away in their little bedroom all morning while Crowley lounged on the chesterfield. The sight of that long, lazy body sprawled facedown on the cushions as he'd bustled by to find a dustpan hadn't irritated him at first, but with time, it had really begun to give him the pip. "Crowley, darling, do you think you could help me move the dressing table?"

"Why?" called Crowley, voice muffled almost certainly by the sofa cushions. 

Aziraphale stood at the top of the stairs and counted to five. "So that I might sweep behind it, dearest."

"And why would you do a thing like that?" Crowley said, still too far away to be any use.

"Oh, never mind," Aziraphale muttered, and turned back into the bedroom.

"I mean," Crowley called, "you could just miracle away the dust if it bothers you. But it's never really bothered you, has it?"

Aziraphale ignored him. He instead found an indecently thin black shirt that Crowley had evidently stuffed under the cushions of the wingback chair by the window. The demon had always preferred to spin his own clothing out of the ether, and as a result did not seem keen on keeping track of it. Lose one shirt, miracle yourself another. He was so careless with tangible things. Aziraphale huffed while folding the wrinkled garment.

He opened a bureau drawer to put the shirt away, then paused, staring into the depths of it. Amid the rolled socks and scattered cuff links (Aziraphale shuddered at the sight) there sat a slim, black leather book. Plain, unadorned. Rather like a diary. Which was absurd, Aziraphale thought, because Crowley did not keep a diary. 

Did he?

Aziraphale placed the shirt aside on the bed and reached for the little volume. He knew deep in his very essence that it would be beastly to pry; if it was a diary (which it couldn't be) he had no right to poke his nose into it. Then again, he said to himself, if it's not a diary (which it most certainly wasn't) then it must be some book that had gotten lost in the shuffle of their combined lives. It was probably Aziraphale's, misplaced here in Crowley's drawer. The silly boy disliked books these days. Preferred television and the portable audio programs he'd tried to foist upon Aziraphale. ("You'd like it, angel. Like radio dramas, just with more advertisements for boxed meals.") 

Aziraphale convinced himself he must open the book just to be sure that it was one of his and to figure out where it belonged. So he flipped the thing open to its first page. And stifled a gasp.

It was not a diary; he'd been correct on that count. It was a sketchbook. 

Aziraphale sank to sit on the dusty floor and paged through the volume. Every inch of paper was covered with scribbles—erratic drawings in pencil and ink and, once in awhile, black charcoal. Aziraphale recognized his own face in some of them. Crowley was in a few others. Sometimes the two of them, together. But in every single drawing, on every single page, there were—

Children. Little babies, unsteady toddlers. Ruddy-faced youths, front teeth missing in their huge smiles. Laughing, jumping in mud puddles, leaping into Aziraphale's arms or sitting on Crowley's shoulders. Stomping on sand castles, climbing trees. Holding their hands while they crossed a busy, rain-slick street. No two the same, dozens and dozens of children sketched out in feverish lines. Aziraphale searched each child's face for some sign of who they were, where they had come from, how Crowley knew them, and why he was drawing them. 

But the answers were not contained in those pages.

He took the sketchbook downstairs with him. Each step creaked like the groan of a ship's hold, like a coffin lid. "Crowley?" he called softly. 

The demon was still where he'd left him, not having moved an inch. Crowley got like this sometimes, reptilian and standoffish. Not wanting to do anything, not much given to speech, needing to be left alone to ride the wave until the mood passed. Aziraphale hated to bother him in this state, but he saw no alternative.

"Crowley," he said again.

Crowley grunted into a cushion, rolling over like it gave him a pain to do so. "Wha'sit?" His eyes, free of their dark glasses, caught sight of the book in Aziraphale's hands. His yellow gaze flicked up to his face. Furious and narrowing. "That's not yours," he hissed.

"No," Aziraphale agreed. He opened the book to the middle, a full spread featuring a drawing of the two of them, lovingly rendered in red and black ink, seated on their usual bench in the park. And between them, short legs kicking, a tiny girl with an ice cream. "Will you please explain it to me?"

Crowley shot off the sofa, his hair wild about his face. "So I doodle a bit. That a crime?" His voice was a snarl. He fished in his jacket pocket and produced his glasses, slapping them onto his face.

"I'm not accusing you of anything untoward—" Aziraphale began.

Crowley's eyebrows flew upward. "_Untoward_!?"

"I just need to understand." Aziraphale closed the book, casting about for something softer to say. "I didn't know you could draw. They're quite good."

"What a compliment," Crowley jeered. "Thanks awfully. I'll remember that the next time you go hunting through my things, looking for— What? Evidence? That I'm the _ worst thing imaginable_?"

"I know you're not," Aziraphale said. "And I didn't mean to— Darling, please. Who are these children?" He held up the sketchbook.

"Nobody." Crowley turned, waving a hand about his head as if shooing away flies. "They're nothing. They're just pictures."

Aziraphale tried again. "Are they children you met in your old line of work or—?"

Crowley heaved a groan and hung his head. "You're not listening." He rubbed at his eyes with his fingertips and turned back. "They're not real. They don't exist. At least, not unless you count—" He wiggled his fingers beside his ear. "Erm, just. In my head. My imagination."

"Oh." Aziraphale paused. He'd thought—well, he wasn't sure what to think, but he'd had a passing notion that these drawings were some sort of penance on Crowley's part, some strange record of the little innocent lives that might have been affected by his demonic schemes. It had seemed the most logical theory. He wasn't sure how to navigate the truth—and he was certain it was the truth, because Crowley was wrapping his arms around himself like he needed his old black armor. Like he'd exposed his soft and vulnerable throat. "But…" Aziraphale swallowed. "Why?"

"Why did I draw them?" Crowley shrugged, not meeting Aziraphale's eyes. He stared at the carpet, a dark curve in the soft beige light of the room. "Dunno, just felt like it. Bored. I could've drawn anything. Water lilies. Rollercoasters."

"But you didn't draw water lilies. You—" Aziraphale flipped through the pages again, each scene of childish delight passing by. Little humans happy and safe and protected and— 

He came to a drawing of Crowley seated in Aziraphale's wingback, a young boy slumped against his shoulder in sleep, tiny thumb stuck in his mouth while Crowley held him close.

Loved. They were loved. He felt so foolish for not recognizing it before. The sketches radiated unending, yearning love. He gazed up at Crowley, mouth hanging open. "Oh, my darling. Why didn't you tell me?"

"Tell you what." Crowley continued his survey of his own shoes. 

"That you want children."

There was a span of silence in which Crowley seemed about to shrug again, but then instead collapsed in an armchair with a quiet scoff. "And what good would that have done, angel?"

"What on earth do you mean?" Aziraphale hastened to take a seat on the sofa across from Crowley. The cushions still held a bit of his warmth. "We could have discussed it. Made plans to—"

"Do _ you _ want children?" Crowley demanded, eyes spearing through Aziraphale in all their yellow fire.

"Well." He shifted on the sofa, glancing down at the book now closed in his lap. He thought of the tender, beautiful drawings it held. "I suppose I never really considered it. But—"

"Great. So that's one reason down." Crowley stuck a finger in the air. "Let's see. Ah, right, can't really have kids, can we?" He stuck up a second. "Not _ equipped _ for it."

"Oh, Crowley, I'm sure we could—" Aziraphale stopped, suddenly unsure if they could, even if they rearranged their corporeal forms. There was no precedent for such a thing, an angel and a demon. Crowley, clearly understanding why his train of thought had derailed, raised his brows expectantly. 

Aziraphale struggled to try a different tack. "That is, there are so many children already in need of a home! We could always—" 

"Of course! Adopt a human child!" Crowley stuck his third finger up. "And when our mortal kid dies while we carry on living forever, that will be just fine, won't it? We'll just get another one!" He shook his head. "Don't be an idiot, Aziraphale. It's not a fucking pet."

"I didn't say it was!" cried Aziraphale. "Must you be so needlessly cruel?"

"Yeah. There it is." Crowley held up four fingers in a tired fan, head bowed. "Can't raise a kid, a thing like me. Shouldn't, anyway." His lips shook once, imperceptible to anyone but Aziraphale, who knew to look for it.

"Darling, you know that's not what I meant. I can't stand that sort of talk from you." Aziraphale sat up straighter. Ignored the prickling sensation at the corner of his eye. "Please. I'd like to have a serious conversation about this."

Crowley laughed, and it was not a pleasant sound. "You don't get it, angel. This is something I—" He gestured at the book in Aziraphale's lap. "I've already thought through it all. And it's not possible, and it isn't happening, so let's just leave it at that."

"We don't know what's possible until we face it together," Aziraphale insisted. He looked down at the book, red-faced. "I thought I knew everything about you, and now it seems I was very wrong. I don't like the idea of you keeping this from me, like it's some secret—"

"I'm allowed secrets," Crowley said, starting from his chair. "I'm allowed to have some private—thing! You don't get to own everything in here," he said, slamming his palm against his heaving chest. "That's not how it works."

"You're twisting my words," Aziraphale said, standing now too, the book falling aside on the sofa. His hands curled into fists. "I only want to make you happy, but I cannot do that if you won't tell me what you want."

"You can't give me what I want," Crowley said. Silence fell. They stared at each other across the infinite expanse of the small, cluttered room. Crowley shook his head. "You can't," he repeated, quieter. "There is no heroic moment where you get to fix this. There's no book with the answer somewhere in the index. There is no miracle. There's nothing you can do; I'm not ever going to be as happy as you want me to be, and you'll just have to live with that."

The tear in his eye clung bravely at the corner. Its fellows were lining up behind. "I see," said Aziraphale. His hands fell slack at his sides. "Of course."

Crowley seemed to hesitate, the black slits of his eyes widening fractionally in their yellow sea. "Angel—"

"I am not enough for you," Aziraphale whispered. "How silly of me to think I might've been."

"All right, now who's twisting words?" said Crowley, but Aziraphale was not listening. 

He turned from the room and went to find his coat and hat. Outside, a rumble of thunder threatened what had been a fairly clear sky. Aziraphale wondered if that was Crowley's doing, or possibly his own. He did feel a bit out of his head. 

"Where are you going?" Crowley stood framed in the doorway to the back room, one thin hand grasping each side of the jamb. "It's about to storm buckets; can't you smell it?"

"I find myself in need of some air," said Aziraphale, shrugging into his raincoat. "I'm going for a walk."

"Aziraphale." Crowley remained in his doorway, watching him.

For a moment, Aziraphale thought Crowley might rush forward. Perhaps hold him in his arms and murmur some little apology into his hair. And then Aziraphale could apologize as well, and they could sit and have something warm and calming to drink. But Crowley just stood there, and so Aziraphale placed his hat on his head.

The last thing he saw before shutting the door was Crowley captured in that rectangle of light, a dark specter haunting their home.


	5. Chapter 5

"We're lost," Aziraphale said. "Thoroughly, irrevocably lost."

"I know exactly where we are," Shadwell protested. He groped about in the dark, gnarled hands sliding across the damp walls of Hell. "We just turn here and—" 

They turned. Right into a blank wall. 

"Another dead end," sighed Aziraphale. He squirmed under the weight of the heavy anorak and adjusted Crowley's borrowed glasses on his nose. He'd gotten somewhat used to the smell, but the dark and disordered corridors of the underworld still filled him with dread. "We will never find Crowley at this rate. We've been walking in circles for hours, and I have it on good authority that, despite popular opinion, Hell is not circular."

Crowley had told him all about it. Well, he'd told Aziraphale what he could stand to recount. Aziraphale remembered those talks, the two of them lounging in bed of an evening, limbs tangled, voices soft as they spoke across the expanse of a pillow. At first, Crowley had dodged Aziraphale's questions. _ Why would you want to know about Hell, angel? It's not fun, trust me. _

Aziraphale couldn't explain why, not in words. Hell had been Crowley's home, for a time. His birthplace, of a sort. And Aziraphale had wanted to know all he could of Crowley, every inch of him, even the bits that weren't beautiful. Yes, especially those. It seemed a rather nasty impulse, and so he hadn't quite managed to tell Crowley about it.

He hadn't quite managed to tell Crowley a great many things.

He thought of their final argument in the back room of the bookshop and shivered. He'd been a fool to think he could accomplish the impossible task of knowing Crowley entirely after a scant six thousand years. 

"Oh, don't be so dramatic, laddie," Shadwell said, rousing Aziraphale from his bleak thoughts. "We just need to double back a ways, get me bearings."

"Yes, but how—" Aziraphale was cut off by the sounds of heavy footfalls heading their direction. Heavier than a human, which meant… 

"Demon," Shadwell muttered. 

There was nowhere to go, no escape to be had. Aziraphale could only square his shoulders and stand tall as the demon strode into view.

It wore an aardvark as its sigil. How funny. He'd have to tell Crowley about that later.

"What are you doing here?" the demon barked. "This section is restricted." 

Aziraphale clacked his fists together. "We are— Well. We've gotten turned around. Just two, erm, lost mortal souls. Being...lost. In the usual way." 

Shadwell slapped a hand to his forehead and dragged it down the length of his face. Aziraphale glared at him. He had never been adept at lying, but there was no need to underscore that fact. 

"Right," the demon drawled. "I'll have to escort you back to your level. Where's your paperwork at?" 

The supposed state of one's paperwork was a popular topic among the damned—their only real concern, actually. It determined which section of Hell they were meant to be shambling through. 

Shadwell had a ready answer, of course. "Waiting for a stamp from Finance." 

The demon turned to Aziraphale. "And you?"

Aziraphale had no answer. His tongue stuck to the roof of his dry mouth like so much sandpaper. The demon's eyes narrowed. Soon realization would set in, and Aziraphale did not care to wait for that.

He pulled his last jam jar from his coat pocket and held it aloft. "Back, you fiend," he cried, "or I will hurl this holy water at you without a second's hesitation."

The aardvark's face went slack in surprise. He held up his hands and took a step back on his cloven hooves. "Whoa, hold on," he said. "How did you get ahold of that?"

Shadwell seemed to enjoy the shoe being on the other foot, because he advanced with his stubby finger poking through the air. 

"This here's a powerful witch," he declared, "that's how."

Aziraphale dropped his hand to his side and spun to pin his mortal guide with a look. "I am not a witch! Good Lord, you were there for the entire thing! I had my wings out, for pity's sake, I—" He stopped. Took a deep breath. Returned to threatening the demon with the jam jar. "I am the Principality Aziraphale, Guardian of the Eastern Gate, Keeper of the Flaming Sword Which Hath Wrought War, and you will tell me where you are keeping the demon Crowley or so help me, I will destroy you." He shook the jar for good measure, sloshing the holy water against its sides. 

The aardvark squinted. "You don't smell like an angel." He looked him over from head to toe. "Ain't dressed like one either."

"I have had a very long day and I don't care to explain," Aziraphale growled. He shook the jar harder. "Now tell me! Where is Crowley?"

"All right, all right!" The demon tossed his hands in the air, his beady eyes wide with terror. "He's in C Block."

"And how would I get there?" 

"Take this hall all the way down, turn right, then the second left, go down the stairs because the lift's always out of order…"

Aziraphale absorbed the convoluted instructions with military precision. Crowley's life depended on it. 

"...and then you'll be at the room where they're holding him," the demon finished. 

"Is there a key? Who has it?" Aziraphale's eyes blazed.

"I don't know, I'm just an errand boy. I wouldn't have a clue about stuff like that!" 

"Very well." Aziraphale kept the jar at arm's length and edged by the demon as if holding him at swordpoint, beckoning Shadwell to follow him. In this way the players switched places, the demon now backed into the dead end of the hall. "You will stay here, beast. If you try to follow us, I'll—" 

And here, disaster struck. The jar slipped from Aziraphale's fingers. He tried to catch it in mid-air but his human reflexes were sadly lacking. The jar tripped off the tips of his fingers and fell to the rocky ground. It shattered and spilled its holy contents in a small puddle. Upon making contact with the Hellish air, the holy water gave a little wet croak before largely evaporating in a cloud of mist.

All three of them stared at the pile of broken glass. 

It was an awkward moment, to be sure. 

"Shit," Shadwell said. Aziraphale, stunned into silence, couldn't help but agree. 

The demon finally looked up with a grin. "I think this is the part where you run," he said, and cracked his knuckles. 

Aziraphale swallowed. "You know, I think you're right." He grabbed hold of Shadwell's arm and took off down the corridor at a sprint. 

* * *

Crowley hung in his chains and stared at nothing. 

He'd given up on trying to remember the important things some time ago, for a given definition of time. Was he alive? He wasn't sure. He didn't _ feel _ alive, but then again, he didn't feel much of anything. Except pain. 

Only living things felt pain, didn't they? Who would know? It was a difficult riddle, one he couldn't ponder for very long. He wished his hands were free. He had an awful itch on his chin. As hard as he tried, he couldn't quite reach with his shoulder. 

Aziraphale appeared again. He'd been coming in and out of focus for, oh, awhile now. It was no longer a surprise to see him.

"Hello angel," Crowley murmured at the floor. He couldn't even muster the energy to remind the apparition that it wasn't real. 

"Oh, my darling," said the ghost. Its soft hand brushed the hair from his eyes. Tucked it behind his sweaty ear. "Crowley, love, I'm so sorry—" He even stuttered the way Aziraphale would.

"No more," Crowley croaked. The chains rattled in time with his labored breathing. "I can't do this anymore."

"You don't have to, dearest. I'm here." Warm lips on his brow. A hand on his jaw. Oh, but that felt— It was hot like pain, but not as sharp. Crowley had forgotten what comfort was. 

"I'm going to tell them," Crowley said. His eyes hopped, glazed and unfocused, along the bright halo that was Aziraphale. His angel, his light in the dark. "I'm sorry. I'm going to tell them everything."

"No, no, it's all right, Crowley." Aziraphale smiled, both hands cradling Crowley's face now. "I'm taking you home. Don't you see? You're safe now."

Crowley blinked at that, lifted his heavy head. All the bones in his body felt brittle, like he might shatter at the slightest movement. It took an age to look into Aziraphale's face properly.

Oh, that face. Soft and warm and lovely. Glowing. 

"You're here?" Crowley licked his peeling lips. "You're really here?" He focused on Aziraphale's touch. Felt his hands on his skin. Remembered comfort, all in a flash. "Angel, you—!" He laughed, his smile cracking his lips at the corners so that he tasted his own blood. "Oh, God and Satan and all the rest! You're actually here!" 

The soft look slipped from Aziraphale's eyes. Crowley watched it go with ice spreading through his belly. His face fell along with his heart. 

"Angel?"

"This is too easy," said the thing wearing Aziraphale's shape. His grip on Crowley's face turned brutal, blunt fingers digging into the exposed skin of his neck. "A tiny bit of hope and you're lit up like Christmas." 

Crowley sagged in his chains, a ragdoll on strings. "Come on," he said as best he could with his jaw in the vise-like grip. "That's—that's not fair."

The ghost smiled coldly. "Poor darling." He wrenched Crowley's head to the side and whispered in his ear. "He's not coming. No one is. Deep down, you know that. And you know why, don't you?"

"Shut up." Crowley screwed his eyes closed. "Stop it, you bastard."

"Tell me," it said, breath hot against Crowley's neck. "Say why." 

"What's the point of this?" Crowley sobbed. "I'm ready to talk. Verrier could waltz in here right now and I'll tell them everything they want to know. Why do I have to—?"

"Because this is Hell, darling, and we don't break anything halfway. Now say it." His voice rose into the sweet register Aziraphale always used when asking Crowley for a little favor. "Please, my dear?"

Crowley choked on the air in his lungs, but the words tumbled out all the same. "No one's coming for me," he said, "because I'm not worth saving."

The vision of Aziraphale released him at last, left him gasping and bound. It smoothed out a wrinkled in its waistcoat, then fiddled with its shirt cuffs. "There we are," he said, kind as Aziraphale always sounded. "Fully broken. You know, I think it suits you."

Crowley didn't answer. He couldn't. There was nothing left to say. He stared at the ground and wished they'd just kill him already. 

"Goodbye, darling," said the thing that wasn't Aziraphale, and between one blurry glance and the next, it was gone. 

* * *

Aziraphale—the real one—huddled behind a jagged, muck-slick rock, breathing harder than he ever had. Beside him, Shadwell hissed, "Now what, genius?" 

The angel-made-mortal shook with adrenaline, which he'd never before experienced and now found to be incredibly inconvenient. "I don't know," he whispered. "Be quiet, will you?" He peeked round the edge of the stone.

Shadows flickered as demons howled in pursuit. "Come on out, angel!" one shouted. Down the hall, someone was banging on something metal. Like a filing cabinet or a sort of rubbish bin. "You can't hide down here forever."

"Sounds like a dozen or more," Shadwell pointed out helpfully. "You really riled them up with that whole 'ooooh, look at me, principal of whatever' speech before dropping that bloody jar! What was that about, anyway?"

"Holy water," Aziraphale said. "The only thing that can destroy a demon. And that was the last of it." 

"The only thing?" Shadwell looked confused for a moment. "What happens if you set one on fire? Or drown 'em? Or take off their heads? Or—?"

"Yes, yes, I get your point. The demon would be discorporated and they would need to procure a new vessel. It's very unpleasant but not permanent." He glanced nervously around the rock, then quickly ducked back into place.

"But it takes them out of play for a time, wouldn't it?" Shadwell balled his hands into fists. "Why don't you do that, then?"

Aziraphale gave a choked sort of laugh. "Mr Shadwell, I am currently mortal. I have all the strength of—well, I don't wish to offend, but a man approaching your age, I suppose. I wouldn't be able to best one demon in a fight, let alone a dozen."

Shadwell settled more firmly against their rock with a huff. "Y'didn't think this through very well, hm?" 

"No." Tears welled in Aziraphale's eyes. He squeezed them shut in horror, but the tears still rolled down his face, stinging hot. "No, I did not." 

The sudden show of emotion seemed to discomfit Shadwell, who, despite his baffling accent, was still most certainly British. "Erm, come on, lad. Pull yourself together," he said, deigning to pat Aziraphale on his shoulder. 

"But you're right," Aziraphale said as the tears continued to flow. "I don't know what I'm doing! I was a fool to even attempt this, and in such a foolish way. I'm useless and powerless and Crowley is going to be killed because of me!"

"Steady on," said Shadwell, but Aziraphale did not take his advice.

"It's all my fault." He couldn't seem to breathe. His chest worked up and down, and his heart pumped faster and faster. Aziraphale felt as if he might expire right then. "I've been so very stupid. If I hadn't looked in that drawer, if I hadn't left the shop, if I hadn't been so stubborn—"

The crack of Shadwell's palm against his face was very loud in the quiet hall. Aziraphale stared at him, red-faced and wide-eyed. 

"There," Shadwell said. "Snapped you out of your state, have we?"

Aziraphale burst into a fresh round of tears.

"Oh Lord," muttered Shadwell.

"You hit me!" Aziraphale cradled his sore cheek. "Why would you hit someone like that? It hurt!"

"It was supposed to help! It's what you do when people are being hysterical."

"That doesn't make any sense!"

"Well, you see it in films, don't you?" 

"This isn't a film," sobbed Aziraphale. "This is my life, and Crowley's, and I've ruined everything."

"Look," Shadwell said, uncomfortable with having to provide comfort, "you've got to do _ something _ here. We can't keep ducking behind rocks for all eternity, and I'm not the sort that can face down a demon." He scrunched his nose. "I might've played at being a great Witchfinder and hunter of evils, but the fact of the matter is I haven't got a clue. You _ do _. You've had all those grand titles, and you know things, and you held that bloody huge fiery sword like you knew how to use it, didn't you?" He knocked his shoulder against Aziraphale's. 

Aziraphale stared at him through a haze of tears. "You remember that?"

"Aye. T'weren't every day you saw a flaming pansy with a flaming sword." Shadwell grinned, then faltered. "What I'm saying is you're the real deal. You fought before. Cannae you do that again? Now? When your boy most needs you to?"

Aziraphale sniffed. "Yes," he warbled. "I can. I shall."

"Good. Now dry your eyes." Shadwell offered a greasy handkerchief. "Can't slay demons while bawling like a baby."

"Who says I can't?" said Aziraphale, and got to his feet. 

Still sniffling, he turned to face the shifting shadows at the end of the long corridor, which coalesced into the same aardvark-marked demon that Aziraphale had so thoroughly failed to best before. 

"There you are," the demon snarled. 

"Yes," Aziraphale said through his tears, "here I am." 

And he launched himself at the creature. The element of surprise was on his side, as mortal souls were not supposed to launch themselves at demons, especially not in a demon's territory. He knocked the foul beast to the ground and beat at it with his bare fists, and, when that didn't seem to be doing the job, a nearby rock about the size of a rotary phone. 

Aziraphale wept the entire time, but in the end, the demon was left a lifeless husk. The less said about the pulp where his face used to be, the better. 

"Well." Shadwell poked his head over the rock. "Not bad for a first try."

Aziraphale looked down at himself. He was covered in the demon's blood, and his knuckles were all torn and bleeding. It was difficult to see very clearly, which at first he attributed to the dark passage and the tears in his eyes, but soon he realized that he'd cracked the sunglasses he was wearing during the struggle.

He removed Crowley's damaged glasses from his face with a little sob. "I was going to give these back to him," he murmured. "I thought he might want them." 

"Probably wants to be free more than he wants his sunnies," Shadwell said in a strangely reasonable way. He nudged Aziraphale ahead. "Go on, lad. You know how to get to 'im from here?"

"Yes, I remember." The directions were burned into his memory. 

"Then get moving." At a loud clatter in the distance, Shadwell turned and stood straighter. "I'll distract 'em if they come this way."

"Oh, thank you, Mr Shadwell," Aziraphale said. "I don't know how I can repay you for this."

"Just get yer ginger and get the Hell out of here," Shadwell said. 

Aziraphale left the broken glasses behind. 

Down the hallways, turning as he was meant to turn, using the dank staircase, turning, turning, an ever-widening path that finally led him to a room. 

He put his hand to the doorknob, resting his forehead against the cool metal, trying to catch his breath. 

"Crowley," he whispered. It was a prayer. It was a mantra. It was enough to keep going forward. He pushed at the door and was surprised to find it unlocked. 

Aziraphale tumbled into the chamber. "Crowley, I'm—!" 

The very empty chamber. 

"No." He looked at the two wooden chairs, the chains dangling purposeless against the wall, the bare walls and floor. "No, no, no." He whirled in a circle, scanning desperately. "Crowley?" 

The door clanged shut behind him. Aziraphale turned back to find a tiny slot in the door sliding open like a speakeasy. A pair of square-pupiled eyes appeared in the rectangle of light. 

"Oh," said the demon. "Hrm. It's you."

"Where is Crowley?" Aziraphale demanded. He tried the knob, but it was locked. He gave up on that and instead pounded on the door with his fists. His poor abused knuckles left streaks of red in their wake. "What have you done with him!?" 

"We've all got questions," said the demon peevishly. "Isn't that just the way things go? Never get that commendation now, I suppose."

"What are you talking about?"

"Ah well." The little slit shut again. "Can't stop the wheels from turning at this point," said the now-muffled voice.

"What wheels?" Aziraphale shouted, but he received nothing in reply save for heavy footsteps that faded into nothing. Aziraphale stilled, his heart in his throat. 

Then he heard another sound: a mechanical whir deep in the walls. He turned slowly, like a child forced to confront a nightmare. A grate opened in the center of the floor, the sort of drain you might expect in the floor of a slaughterhouse to collect the blood. Aziraphale paled. 

But this opening was not meant to take in things. It was meant to expel them. From somewhere beneath the floor, water began to bubble up, spilling across the floor in cold sheets. It sizzled a little as it entered the room. Aziraphale's eyes widened. 

Holy water. 

"This was meant for Crowley," he said to himself. He felt sick to his stomach. "They planned to drown him in it. Oh, God." He pounded on the door again, but it was no use. The water was rising, almost to his ankles now. Holy or not, Aziraphale knew his mortal form wouldn't take kindly to being drowned. He would die here. 

But where was Crowley? Was this the wrong room? Or had he already been—? 

"Lord, no," Aziraphale sobbed. His bleeding fingertips scrabbled at the door hinges. "Please, no." 

The freezing water was nearly to his knees. He sagged down onto said knees, drenching his lower half. The anorak was getting heavy with water, so he shucked it off. His breathing was coming much too fast again. 

He hadn't prayed since the almost-end of the world. He wondered if he should try it now. Oh, how Crowley would tease him if he knew. Tears dripped from his chin to join the rising water. His beautiful demon. His greatest love. If only he could have seen him one last time….

A light came from above. 

Well, that's what it seemed like from Aziraphale's perspective, anyway. What had actually happened was a trapdoor-like contraption in the ceiling slid open to reveal a sort of window that looked up into a world of pure white, blinding in its brilliance.

Aziraphale had to shade his eyes to look up at it, squinting as he did so. "Hello?" he called. 

A head crowned in wet red hair popped into view. 

Aziraphale thought he might be dreaming. 

"Crowley!" he cried. His heart felt fit to burst.

"Angel?" Crowley stared down at him, mouth open. "What—? Where's all that water coming from?"

"Never mind that!" Aziraphale stood to better shout at the portal. "How did you get up there?"

* * *

_ A little over an hour ago _

When the door to Crowley's cell creaked open, he didn't bother with looking up. He hoped it was Verrier come to end this senseless torture, but he supposed it didn't matter either way. He was done for. Finished. A soon-to-be ex-member of existence. 

The body of a demon was tossed to his feet, right into his line of sight. Crowley blinked down at it. Looked like the poor blighter'd had his corporation's neck snapped. One of the aardvark twins. 

"I don't get it," he muttered. "Is this supposed to frighten me?" He glanced up, expecting Verrier.

Instead he came face to face with a stranger. A human. She wore her hair long and her robes, in layers. 

"You are the Demon Crowley?" she asked. 

Crowley regarded her with suspicion. Weird twist, really. He wasn't sure how it was supposed to fit in with his torture. "Who wants to know?"

The woman sighed. "Thought you'd say that." She took a key from a pocket in her voluminous skirts and began working at the manacle on Crowley's left wrist. "My name is Agnes Nutter. Can you stand?"

"Nutter?" Crowley wracked his muzzy brain. "Nutter the witch? The one who wrote my souvenir book with all the prophecies?" His left arm, now unchained, dropped to his side like a lead weight.

"The same." Agnes moved to free his right hand. 

"But what are you doing here?"

"Ah, well," said the witch as she worked the key into the lock. "It so happens that if you arrange things such that a few dozen people are killed in an explosion, you've broken one of the bigger commandments. In my defense, they were keen on killing me first, but—" She clicked her tongue. "Details don't seem to budge the Almighty. So here I am, damned to Hell." 

"No, I mean—" Crowley made a face. "Why are you _ here _? Helping me?"

Agnes seemed taken aback. She stared into Crowley's no doubt ashen face and said, "You saved the world and all of humanity, Demon Crowley. Why wouldn't I help you?"

Crowley paused, then let his head fall back against the cold metal wall. "I get it. More glimpses of hope that can be snatched away from me, hm? Let's just skip ahead to the part where you disappear, all right?"

The witch unlocked Crowley's right wrist and stepped out of the way as he toppled to the floor, landing flat on his face with a shocked cry and a thump. 

She tsked and stooped to unlock the manacles at his ankles. "Believe me or don't, Demon, but I am not some vision. I am here to release you, for my second sight comes to me even in Death, and what I have seen is dire."

"Grrkkt," said Crowley. He couldn't say much else with his face smushed against the floor.

"You were right, what you said in the square of green when you returned your angel's face." Agnes made quick work of one lock and moved to the other, which proved more tricky. She gritted her teeth as she jiggled the key. "The next war shall be all the forces of Heaven and all the armies of Hell united against mankind." The manacle at last gave way and she gave a satisfied grunt. "That is why they captured you, Demon Crowley. They wished to know your secret to surviving water made holy so they could defend themselves accordingly on Earth."

Crowley rolled over onto his back, wincing at the pain in his shoulders. "Wouldn't even work for them. Idiots." Then, realizing all the implications, he sat up sharply, ignoring his screaming limbs. "Where's Aziraphale? Is he safe? Did they—?"

Agnes Nutter shook her head. "I cannot see the angel. My visions show me only glimpses. But I know from the whispers I've caught here in the lower levels that the plan was for Heaven to take him as Hell took you." Her eyes softened. "Forgive me. I would have come for you sooner, only my visions are murky and difficult to parse." 

Crowley laid back down and stared up at the ceiling, trying to absorb all this. The war to end everything was coming. More pressingly, Aziraphale was in trouble. The things those angelic bastards would do to him to make him talk— 

"Right." Crowley swallowed. "_ Right_." He sat up and struggled to his feet. "I need to get to Heaven."

"What?" Nutter's face fell. "Do you not mean that you need to get back to Earth? To warn humanity and prepare for the onslaught?"

"No," Crowley ground out. "I mean Heaven. I've got to get to Aziraphale."

"Mark me, Serpent," said Agnes. "If they have the angel in their clutches, then by now he's sure to be—" She was silenced by a sharp look from Crowley, his yellow eyes blazing. With a sigh, she tried again. "It's too late for Aziraphale. We must do what we can for the rest of the world."

Crowley advanced on the witch with fire in his veins. For the first time since he'd been chained up, he felt like his engine had been started. Might be broken, sure, but it still worked. "I don't care about the world," he hissed. "I only care about him."

Agnes eyed him in a way that made Crowley wonder if her visions had shown her their last argument in the bookshop, and whether she doubted his words. 

"Look," he said, quieter, "there's a chance that they haven't—that Aziraphale hasn't let slip the thing with the faces and the fire. If I can get him out of there before that happens, then we're good, yeah? Hell doesn't have the secret and neither does Heaven. War plans get stalled. For a little while, at least. That's what we want, right?"

"Yes, but—"

"Please," Crowley said. He was begging now. He could feel his eyes going full snake. Hoped it didn't put her off. "If there's even a chance he's alive— If there's any way I can get to him— You've got to help me."

Agnes hesitated. "There is a path. I have spent long enough in Hell's depths with my ear to the ground to know of it." 

Crowley's heart thudded. "Then show me!"

She shook her head. "My powers are not so great as to allow a demon to walk through Heaven's gates in safety. The Heavenly host will scent you out and cut you down the moment you arrive. It would be madness to send you there."

Crowley's mind whirred. His imagination, which had always been his greatest gift and his literal downfall, kicked into gear. "Fine," he said at last. "A demon can't get into Heaven undetected? Then I won't be a demon." 

Agnes Nutter frowned. Even her most wild visions could not have shown her this. "What are you saying?" 

"Make me mortal," Crowley said, "and show me the way. I'll do the rest."

Again the witch considered Crowley's pleas, but loud noises in the corridor without drew her attention. They listened to the echo of footsteps and demonic shouts. Something was making a ruckus in the upper levels.

"Quickly, while their eyes are elsewhere." Agnes grabbed Crowley by the arm. "Come with me."

It was laughably easy, turning Crowley into a human. Nutter led him to a little bolthole she'd carved out for herself in some deserted section of Hell, just a tiny room hidden behind a decaying filing cabinet. There she lit a candle, said some words, smeared Crowley's brow with something oily, and just like that, his occult nature was ripped away like a flag from a pole in a stiff wind. Crowley was left shivering, panting. Human. 

"Easy now," Agnes murmured, her hands hovering over his shoulders as if unsure she should touch him. "That will have drained you. You need to rest for awhile."

"No," Crowley forced himself to say. "No rest. Show me this path you heard about."

Which is how Crowley found himself on the shore staring out across the ocean.

It wasn't really an ocean, obviously. It was just some dark expanse of water located deep in the lower levels of Hell, reaching far into the shadows where it disappeared as if over the edge of a planet. But Hell wasn't a planet, so it couldn't be what it looked like.

"I don't know either," said Agnes Nutter, reading his puzzled look. She stood beside Crowley on the black-sand beach and stared out across the water with him. "All I know is what I've heard: beyond this sea lies Heaven. And perhaps your angel, if he lives."

"How am I supposed to get across?" Crowley asked. "I don't have a boat. Not even a paddle."

"I'm a witch," said Agnes, "not a shipbuilder. I've never attempted it. This is as far as I can take you."

Crowley let out a long breath. "That's all right. Thanks, by the way. This is a lot farther than I would've gotten on my own." He started shrugging out of his black suit coat. 

Agnes stared at him. "What are you doing?" 

"Going for a swim," Crowley said with grim determination. He kicked off his boots and stripped off his socks. They lay motionless on the beach in a haphazard pile with his coat as he walked to the water's edge. "Wish me luck, Nutter."

"Fare thee well, Demon Crowley," she called. 

Crowley, wading through the shallows, did not look back. 

Soon his feet couldn't touch the bottom, and Crowley began to swim.

The sea was black as tar, and the air above seemed cast into perpetual night. There were no stars or moon to guide him, so Crowley just kept swimming forward in what he hoped was a straight line. Waves lapped over and around him, gentle at first, but the farther he swam, the stronger they became. 

Crowley cursed as brackish water flooded his mouth and nose. He raised his head only to duck back beneath the surface before a huge wave broke over him. He tumbled through the swirling sea, helpless in the current. His lungs burned for air, and he surfaced with a horrid gasp. 

He was so tired. This mortal body was failing on every front. His eyes were bleary and his limbs were slow to move. He couldn't seem to catch his breath. Crowley swam and hoped he was swimming toward Aziraphale and not back toward Hell.

The waves grew higher. The water became colder. Crowley's muscles ached worse than they ever had before, and there was no relief. He wondered if perhaps this was all in his head, just another torture his mind had constructed, and he had never actually left his cell.

But then he thought of Aziraphale, and he swam. If there was a chance, even the slimmest little iota of a chance that this was real and Aziraphale needed him, then Crowley would try. 

The waves dragged him down into the black water. It took him longer to surface, pained him more to breathe. The ocean rocked with some unseen storm. And in the middle of it, bobbing as insignificantly as a cork, was Crowley. 

He sputtered, treading water. His strength was nearly gone. Drowning was a bad way to go, he knew. It's how they used to kill witches; no wonder Nutter had never braved this route.

"Come on," Crowley mumbled at the sky, or what he thought was supposed to signify the sky. "If you're listening, give me a break, would you? Just this once?"

A huge wave, more fierce than all the last, crashed into him. Crowley was pulled under, head over feet, into a dark abyss.

_ Hilarious_, he thought as he sank. _ Real laugh riot, you are. _

Then, because he didn't want his last thoughts to be pissy barbs aimed at the Almighty, Crowley thought of Aziraphale. Tried to recall every detail of how he looked, his ridiculous little reading glasses perched on his wonderful nose as he sat in an armchair and read a book in the late afternoon sunlight. The way his hair caught like a halo. The way his lips parted as he mouthed the words of some beloved passage. His eyes lighting up as he raised them and found Crowley.

_ It wasn't all bad_, Crowley thought. _ For a few moments there, I really had something. _

He closed his eyes against the pressure of the depths.

_ I'm sorry, angel. I loved you. _

A current drove Crowley violently sideways with a roar, and instead of dying with his lungs full of black water, he found himself gasping breathlessly on a slick white floor. 

He lay there for a moment, dripping.

With deep suspicion, Crowley sat up and took in his new surroundings. 

His bare feet were dangling in some sort of modernist fountain, where the clear water lapped at his toes. The walls and staircases seemed to be spun from glass and pure white concrete. It was like the lobby of a very fancy non-profit organization that had suddenly lost its funding and jettisoned their entire staff. It was empty and silent as a church on a Saturday night. 

"Okay," Crowley muttered to himself, "maybe limbo, maybe purgatory, maybe—" 

"Oh, you're in Heaven all right," said a voice behind him. 

Crowley jumped about a foot in the air. "Jesus—!" He turned. And gaped. "Christ?"

The man himself smiled, all bearded and robed and brown-skinned. "Nice to see you again, Crowley." 

"Is it?" Crowley asked with a grimace. "No hard feelings about, you know...the tempting?"

"Of course not," said Jesus. "You were just doing your job. And anyway, it was lovely to meet the Mayans."

"It was, wasn't it?" Crowley glanced around. The place had been remodeled since he'd been here last. He didn't care for it. "Where is everybody?"

Jesus shrugged. "You know what they say: Heaven is empty, etc. Quite boring, if I'm honest. We don't get many new faces around here." He extended a hand down to Crowley.

Crowley stared at it for a moment, then took it, allowing Christ to help him to his feet. Rough hands, he noted. Right, carpenter. 

Jesus squinted at him. "You look, erm, different since last we met. Ah!" He brightened. "Of course. You're not a woman today. Your gender, it changes, doesn't it?"

"Yeah," Crowley said in a bit of a daze. "It does do that."

"That's nice. Fluidity. I'm learning all the lingo, you know. Trying to stay current." He looked around the empty lobby. "Not much else to do up here, really." 

"Then you're in luck. I've got a bit of a job ahead of me." Crowley chanced a smile, the same one he'd worn in a desert when he'd first met a twentysomething kid from Nazareth. "Want to come?"

And just as he'd been in the desert, Jesus was politely game. 

Crowley gave a quick sketch of the story so far as Christ led him out of the soaring lobby and into one of the nifty glass lifts. He left out the part about his book of drawings and the fight with Aziraphale and the fact that he wasn't quite sure if anything was real anymore, but Jesus got the gist. He nodded sympathetically at Crowley's description of nearly drowning; big on sympathy, that was Christ all over. 

"So now I've got to find Aziraphale and save him from Gabriel and Michael and the rest of these angelic dickheads. Oh, and, erm, save humanity. You like humanity," Crowley added. "Any idea where they're keeping him?"

Jesus hummed in thought. "I haven't heard anything regarding this war or your Aziraphale, but that doesn't mean much. I'm not really kept in the loop as far as the angels go," he said. "They sort of leave me to my own devices." 

"Hmrph," Crowley grunted. He watched the glassy levels fly past outside the lift. _ Where are you, angel? _

"But I have an idea where we might start," said Christ. "There's a wing on the upper floors where I'm not supposed to go. No one is, except the angels. I think—" He lowered his voice even though they were totally alone. "—something fishy might take place there."

"Sounds promising," Crowley said. "How many angels will we have to get through?"

"Not sure. I haven't seen many of them around lately. Normally you'll run into one here or there, but not now." Jesus frowned. "Maybe they've all gone to Earth."

_ Or maybe they're all waiting for a turn to take a shot at Aziraphale as we speak_, Crowley thought darkly. "Right. If we run into any, do you think you can distract them long enough for me to slip by?"

Jesus grinned. "I can usually corner them for a few minutes of debate. Their notions of faith are wild. They can't fathom humanity at all." 

"That, I can believe," muttered Crowley. The lift slid to a stop and dinged open. 

A rather bored-looking angel with a head covered in gold stood at the far end of the hall, examining his nails. 

"Stay here," Jesus whispered, shooing Crowley into the corner of the lift where the shiny chrome button bank would hide him from view. "Once I have his attention, you can slip by."

"You really like all this spy stuff, huh?" Crowley flattened himself against the bulkhead. "Do they let you watch James Bond films up here?" 

"Only the Connery ones," Jesus said. "Bit problematic, of course, but you have to admit, they had style."

Crowley shrugged and made a face that said _ that's fair_.

Jesus strode out of the lift, his simple sandals slapping against the pristine floor. "Remiel," he called, "I was hoping I'd find you here."

Crowley risked a peek around the corner, keeping his finger firmly on the Door Open button. 

The angel Remiel did not seem pleased. "Christ child," he said with a sour look, "shouldn't you be waiting to greet new souls at the Gates with Peter?" 

"Oh, Peter's got it handled. Now, listen, I have some thoughts on the subject of forgiveness."

Remiel heaved a sigh as if to say _ not this again_, and Jesus launched into a speech that would make even an Oxford scholar proud—or shake their head in confusion, which in academia is close enough. As he spoke, Jesus edged closer and closer to the angel, who attempted to scoot further and further away. In this way, the King of Kings was able to corral him around so that his back was to the rest of the corridor. 

Jesus gave the signal, a quick little wave of his fingers at Crowley. 

Crowley darted. Quietly.

"Yes, but," the angel was sighing, "we can't let in just anyone. If we do that, where will they all fit? It would be a disaster."

"I'm not saying anyone, just perhaps more than one soul in every generation?" Jesus said. "I've run some numbers and considering the square footage here, which is infinite—" 

Crowley did not stay to hear the rest of the Christ's elevator pitch. He eased the door at the end of the hall open and slipped inside, shutting it carefully behind him. 

He was in. 

In a very boring white room that conspicuously did not contain Aziraphale. 

Crowley nearly slumped to the floor. He was still very wrung out from his dip in the ocean, and Heaven was proving very chilly, and without his coat and in soaked clothes, Crowley started to shiver. He dragged his hands through his damp hair. He wanted this to be over. He wanted Aziraphale in his arms. He wanted a hot cup of coffee, black and strong. He wanted one fucking chance to make things right, he wanted— 

His eyes fell on the center of the floor, where a strange sort of circle seemed to be etched into the white concrete. A sigil, maybe? Crowley approached and nudged the line of it with his bare toes. 

It wasn't carved into the floor. It cut right through it. Some kind of trapdoor, then. 

Crowley fell to his knees and ran his hands along the smooth surface. It was like caressing a huge sheet of bleached bone. Until his fingertips found a small divot in the floor. A handle. 

Crowley tugged at it. The circle slid away. Beneath was a sort of porthole of clear glass, and below that— 

"Hello?" called a voice.

That voice. The only sound Crowley wanted to hear. He pressed his face to the glass. It was a good thing he was kneeling because his legs turned to jelly. 

There, below: a smudge of light in a dark room. The sound of rushing water. Wide blue eyes staring up at him. 

"Crowley!" Aziraphale cried. 

Crowley's throat worked. "Angel?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this one took so long! Hope you're still on board <3


	6. Chapter 6

There was, as you might imagine, a lot of crosstalk while Crowley stared down at Aziraphale from Heaven and Aziraphale gazed up at Crowley from Hell, much of which stemmed from the misunderstanding of what was happening. They couldn't be blamed; the reality of the thing didn't make much sense, after all.

"How did you get up there?" Aziraphale asked.

Crowley blinked. "I swam. What are you doing down there? And why do Heaven's holding cells look the same as Hell's?" 

"What are you talking about?" The water, by this point, was at Aziraphale's waist. He sloshed his way over to the two wooden chairs and began stacking. "Heaven doesn't have holding cells."

"Erm," Crowley said. "Then…?"

Aziraphale stilled. "Hold on." He squinted up at Crowley in the bright while circle of the porthole. "Where are you, exactly?"

"In Heaven! Where are you?"

"I'm in Hell! What the blazes are you doing in Heaven?" Aziraphale cried. 

"Not rescuing you as effectively as I planned, apparently!" Crowley rested his forehead against the glass, trying to get a better look Aziraphale. "You shouldn't be down there, angel, it's too dangerous."

Aziraphale's head snapped up. "Oh, _ is it_? Is it _ really_?" He gestured to the rising water. "I had no idea! Thank you for informing me."

"No, I mean—" Crowley snaked his head about on his neck. "Demons can smell you a mile away. What were you thinking?"

"Of you!" Aziraphale exploded. "Of saving you! Because I love you more than anything!" _ You absolute prick _ went unsaid, but was somehow still implied. 

Crowley breathed against the glass for a moment, then wiped away the fog it made. "You came for me?" he asked.

"Yes." Aziraphale looked about the flooding cell and tentatively mounted the stacked chairs to stay above it. "For all the good it's done us. Oh, Crowley, I'm so sorry for what I said in the bookshop! I should have never—"

"We've got more important things to worry about," he said in a rush. "Let's not get into that right now." 

Aziraphale gazed fretfully at the water. "I'm not sure I'll have the chance later," he confessed. 

"What? Come on, just—" Crowley snapped his fingers. "And get up here with me."

"That's just it, darling." Aziraphale swallowed. He climbed as high as he could on the chairs, his face now a mere foot from the glass. "I've, erm, been made mortal. Miracles are impossible for me at the moment." His eyes widened. "Oh, but could you—?"

All the color drained from Crowley's face, and Aziraphale's hope faded. 

"I turned human too," Crowley murmured. "Had to. Thought they had you up here. So I— Yeah." 

"Ah. It was the same with me." Aziraphale smiled weakly. "Reminds one of something out of O. Henry, doesn't it? How silly." He glanced at the water, which was about to his chest now. When he looked back up, he had tears in his eyes. "Crowley, listen...."

Crowley shook his head. "No. Don't panic. We're not panicking. You're going to be fine." He looked around the white room he'd snuck into. Besides the porthole and a few spare columns, there wasn't much to see. "I just need to find something that can break the glass."

Aziraphale smiled. It was a sad smile. "Darling, I want you to know that these last fifteen months have been the most wonderful in my entire existence—" 

"No!" Crowley stabbed a finger against the porthole. "Stop saying goodbye to me. I won't let you." 

"—and I'm sorry we quarreled," Aziraphale barreled ahead. "I love you so much; I only want you to be happy, and if you can't manage that, then I want you to be safe." His voice broke on his words. "Please, go. Don't let them find you. It's all right, my dear, I'm not afraid. I'm not afraid at all."

"I'm not leaving you." Crowley scrubbed his forearm across his eyes. Bloody human tear ducts. He didn't have time to cry! Bloody human body. Bloody—everything! Crowley balled his hand into a fist and beat on the porthole with all his puny, mortal strength. "I." Thud. "Love." Thud. "You." Thud. "And I am _ not _ leaving."

The water was at Aziraphale's neck. He reached up with his bruised and bleeding hands but couldn't quite touch the glass. "Crowley—" 

We would like to say it was pure, overwhelming love that broke the glass, but the truth of the matter is, it was Crowley's knuckles and skin and blood that got the job done. He shattered his wrist in doing it and fractured the birdlike bone that lined his forearm, but he considered the price more than fair. 

Aziraphale ducked his head underwater to avoid the rain of shards, and then he was groping for Crowley's hands, catching hold of them, being hauled into the cold white tundra of Heaven. Crowley's arm gave a shriek of protest, but he ignored it and kept hauling until Aziraphale was free of his prison. 

They lay there on the floor side by side like two wet fish, gasping in the chill. The holy water overflowed the room below and trickled around their feet. Aziraphale's limp hand at last found Crowley's hair and brushed it back from his huge yellow eyes. 

"Oh, darling," he said as they stared at each other separated only by inches and nothing else. "Oh, my love." 

"Pretty butch, yeah?" Crowley grinned, then became serious. "You came for me. I wasn't about to give up on you." He gave a little hiss of pain as his broken wrist throbbed. "Fuck, that hurts."

There was a commotion on the other side of the door that Crowley had slipped through, raised voices and footsteps. 

"We must be quick," said Aziraphale, and helped Crowley to his feet with a pull on his good arm. "Come on." He went to the wall opposite and placed his hand on some invisible piece of door, and the thing swung open.

"I hate this place. Stupid layout," Crowley muttered as he followed Aziraphale through, cradling his injured arm against his chest. 

Where Hell was a labyrinth of dark corporate hallways, Heaven was a series of Apple Stores that had been emptied of people and inventory. Everything was bare and blank and clean, a perfect nothingness for no one. Aziraphale led Crowley through each cavernous white space, running as fast as their legs would take them, holding each other by the hand and not daring to let go. 

Then there came a point when their mortal bodies could run no longer, and Aziraphale pulled Crowley behind one of the broader columns where they could collapse with their backs to it and try to catch their breath. 

"Angel—" Crowley said. His hand lifted as if to touch Aziraphale's face, but the pain flared and Crowley lowered it with a wince. "What now?"

Aziraphale looked at him. "I don't know." He squeezed Crowley's good hand tighter. "Forgive me, I—I don't know."

Crowley slumped back further against the column. "Our luck's run out, I suppose. Was bound to happen eventually." 

Their gazes caught. Held a moment. They moved as one to share a kiss. It was a solemn thing, and Aziraphale broke it with a sob. 

"If this is the end, then at least we're together," he said. 

"Yeah." Crowley leaned his forehead against Aziraphale's. No glass between them. Nothing but their shared history, their millennia of wanting, their all-too brief moment of having. "Hey, I'm sorry too. About before. At the shop. I shouldn't have let you think you weren't enough. You've always been enough, angel."

"My dear boy." Aziraphale combed his fingers through his damp red hair. "I shouldn't have taken it so hard. I only wish—" He bit his lip.

"No, go on," Crowley said.

Aziraphale hesitated. "I shouldn't like to argue when we have so little time left."

"And I don't want to die wondering how that sentence ends." Crowley kissed him again, lingering. "It's all right, angel. You can tell me."

Blue eyes held him fast. "I wish you would have told me earlier how much you wanted children."

A sigh blew through Crowley. "Angel, we've been over this. It wouldn't have mattered; you couldn't have done anything about it."

"I could have mourned with you." Aziraphale placed one soft, pale hand against Crowley's face. His gaze stayed on his mouth. "It would have been...an honor to do so. You deserved a child, Crowley. There is so much love in your heart; I should know. When I think of how loved that child would have been— Our child—" And then he could not speak for all the tears.

"Oi," Crowley said, quiet and small. He scooted closer and put his arms around Aziraphale, not caring about the pain. "Come here, angel, come on. Don't you cry. I'll start in too and we can't have that." But it had already happened, so there it was. 

They clung to each other in warm, tearful silence. It was one of those perfect moments of understanding and comfort. You don't get too many of those, not even when you've lived for six thousand years.

Then came footfalls. The rush of wings. Crowley lifted his head. "They're here."

Gabriel's voice, distinct in its booming, echoed through the whiteness. _ They won't get far. Find them. _That sort of thing.

Aziraphale leaned in to kiss Crowley, then kissed him again. "Shall we stand?" he asked.

Crowley nodded. "Together." 

They got to their feet and held hands by unspoken agreement, going to meet their end. 

A whole platoon of angels was there to greet them when they stepped out of the pillar's shadow. Michael caught sight of them first. 

"Oh," she said, straightening her sharp lapels. "Here you are."

Two hands clasped tighter. 

"We'll have to destroy you, you know," Michael continued. "Should be simple enough now that you've foolishly made yourselves mortal."

Gabriel popped his head round another column. "Aziraphale! I don't suppose you'll tell us how you survived the Hellfire before you, uh, expire?" 

Aziraphale shook his head. "I think not."

"Well, torture has always been Hell's purview." Michael beckoned a few of the angelic legions forward with their golden lances. "But perhaps we can give it a try, hm?" 

Crowley stiffened, his throat making a pained little noise, but Aziraphale pressed his hand harder. 

"Kind of anti-climatic," said Gabriel as the angels advanced. "After all that, it ends up just— Blah." He waved his hands at them. "Disappointing. No big hurrah at the end, nothing. Oh well." He smiled his estate agent's smile. "That's life for you."

Crowley and Aziraphale stood together and awaited their end, eyes squeezing shut as their fingers squeezed together. 

Then God showed up.

* * *

Aristotle and Aziraphale had spoken once about moments like this. The machines of God, Aristotle called them, scoffing into his wine. 

"It indicates that the author has lost the thread," he complained. "They don't know what else to say, and so just end it, end it all as swiftly as possible! Have everyone go home happy and satisfied. Grinning fools." 

"Oh, I don't know," Aziraphale said, pouring them another skinful. "Sometimes things just happen, don't they? Things that are out of your control. Most things, in fact, are out of one's control, so why be upset about the same in fiction?"

"Because," Aristotle groused, "fiction should improve upon reality. It should be cleaner. Neater. Better told." Bit of a hypocrite when you consider the old boy's writings on biology. "I just can't abide this constant use of the machine!" 

"Well, I'm sure it will fall out of fashion any day now," Aziraphale assured him. 

It had not. 

God walked toward them all with a put-upon sigh. She looked very good for Her age though there was an air of tiredness about Her, like a criminally underpaid school matron who'd much rather be taking a nap than dealing with her charges.

The angels looked uncomfortable. Gabriel especially was rather flushed.

"Glory to God in the Highest," was all he managed by way of greeting.

God ignored him and came to stand before Aziraphale and Crowley with Her hands on Her hips. "Well," She said, "what a mess this is."

Heaven disappeared. Or at least, that is what it seemed like to Aziraphale and Crowley, who opened their eyes to find themselves dry, not broken or bleeding, and freshly clothed, sitting side by side at a little table in a cheery, reclaimed wood sort of cafe. They patted at their own middles, then at each other's middles, just to be sure they were whole. 

"Crowley, are you—?" Aziraphale's hands went to Crowley's face, cupping desperately.

"Fine, angel." Crowley's hands clung onto Aziraphale's neck and the back of his head. He stared, wild-eyed. "You?"

Aziraphale gasped out a happy whimper. "I'm all right. Absolutely all right." His relief took the form of a watery smile; his tears made the vision of Crowley's face before him shimmer and dance. Then, remembering, he attempted to reach out and make a miracle. Just a small one, a cup of tea appearing on the table. Nothing happened. "I'm still mortal, though."

Crowley paused for a moment to exert himself, shook his head. "Yeah, same here." 

Two cups of tea appeared on the table, but not miraculously. They were placed there by the waitress, who asked them, "Anything else?"

"One of those cardamom buns, please," said God, who _ did _ appear miraculously in a chair opposite them. Crowley and Aziraphale sprang apart, but the waitress was nonplussed. As she bustled away to fill the order, God confided in them, "They have excellent buns here."

"Where are we?" Crowley demanded. His sunnies slipped down his nose in his agitation; they had been replaced along with his shoes and coat. "Is this limbo? A pocket dimension in space-time?"

"It's Seven Dials, Crowley," God said with a frisson of admonishment, and smiled up at the at the waitress as she placed the bun in front of Her on a chipped white plate. "Thank you so much." Then, turning back to them, She began tearing off tiny strips of pastry with quick, delicate movements. "I just thought it might be nice to sit for awhile. Have a chat."

Crowley shared an uneasy glance with Aziraphale. 

"Chat about what, exactly?" Aziraphale said. Unseen beneath rustic table, atop the rustic bench on which they sat, Aziraphale's hand sought out Crowley's fingers. Curled over them. Protective.

God chewed. "Whatever you like, I suppose." She slid Her plate toward Aziraphale. "Try some; you'd like it." 

"Don't eat that," Crowley snapped. He stabbed a finger at the Almighty. "You've got a lot of nerve, sitting there like, like, like nothing's wrong when you let_ all that _ happen!"

"Crowley—" Aziraphale said, a soft warning. 

Crowley ignored him. "Aziraphale could have drowned! He could have been killed! Or—or damned forever or something!" His hand turned under Aziraphale's and clutched hard, their fingers lacing. "And you waited for, what? A grand entrance?"

"You want an apology," God said. "Not just for this. For everything."

"Of coursssssse I do," Crowley hissed. His voice slipped back into the way it had been all those millennia ago when his throat was still learning how to work. "You missssserable excussssse for a—"

"Crowley!" Aziraphale said. He looked fearfully at God, then back to his demon. "Please." 

God let a strip of Her cardamom bun fall back to the plate and wiped Her sticky fingertips on a cloth that appeared from thin air. Her face was completely inscrutable. Not malicious, but not a comfort either. "I know I haven't been," She waggled Her head a bit, "exactly what you wanted Me to be. It must have been very difficult for you, both of you, in different ways."

Crowley's mouth opened, but Aziraphale shushed him before he could interrupt. 

"I admit it. I've checked out," said God, sipping at her tea. "It's like that sometimes. You get to the end of a project and maybe it's not the way you pictured it. It's not quite perfect. Nothing is, not even Me, so what can you do?"

"Not even You?" Aziraphale gasped. "But—" 

She looked at him and he was silenced with a click of his jaw. 

"You both possess very good imaginations," She mused. "I saw to that. Tell me, can you imagine what it's like? Being Me, I mean." Her eyes twinkled. "Being responsible for _ everything_. Able to hear _ everything_. Phone ringing every time _ anything _happened." She shrugged. "It's enough to drive anyone mad. Do you blame Me for delegating the day-to-day and going into a sort of...semi-retirement?"

"So this whole time," Crowley said slowly, "you've been sitting on a celestial beach sipping divine Mai Tais?" 

God did not answer, just like always. She took another bite of Her bun, then offered it to Aziraphale again with Her eyebrows arched in question. 

"Oh, no thank you," Aziraphale said, but only out of loyalty to Crowley. It did look rather good. 

God made a face that said _ fine, your loss _ and returned Her attention to Crowley. "You're angry with me still. I thought you might be. I wish you'd find a way to let that go."

Crowley's hand jerked and only remained under the table due to Aziraphale's strong grip. "You know what I wish?" he growled. "I wish—" 

The bell above the door chimed and a man walked in. He looked very different compared to the last time they had seen him, but still there was no mistaking who he was. He looked a bit like that actor; you know the one. For a year or so he was in everything and you got a bit sick of seeing his face.

Crowley's chair scraped against the floor as he pushed it back to stand. 

"Satan," Crowley said in greeting, flat and quiet. 

At first Aziraphale thought perhaps Crowley was standing out of respect for the Devil, but he soon realized that was not the case. Crowley shifted on his feet, putting himself more firmly between Satan and Aziraphale. Sometimes, Aziraphale thought, heart aflutter, that serpent of his could be quite the dashing romantic. 

"You won't take him," Crowley told him. "You're not my boss any longer and you certainly aren't his, so why don't you just piss off and leave us alone."

"Crowley," Aziraphale admonished. "You needn't be so rude." Satan or no, manners were still in order. Gesturing to the open chair next to God Herself, Aziraphale said to the Devil, "Please. Are you hungry? They do a very nice—"

"Cardamom bun, I know," drawled Satan. And he took the offered seat, setting the picnic basket Aziraphale only just noticed on the table between them. "Mother," he said, giving God a nod. 

"Lucifer." God's smile seemed genuine, but then, how could one be certain? "You look well." 

"Unclean living," said the Devil with a sniff. "How are things with You lately?" 

"I've been just fine, dear."

Satan looked back toward the cafe's little glass display. "Oh, Hell, they're out of the blueberry ones."

"Ah, I forgot to have them bake extra this morning," said God with a sigh. She held up one palm in the air. "That one's on Me." 

"Hold on— You—" Aziraphale gaped at the two beings seated across from him. "You two _ talk_? You get together like this in coffee shops? But you're—"

"Ours is a very complicated relationship." God plucked one of the teacups from its saucer and took a sip. "But we are doing some excellent work on our issues. Aren't we, Lucifer?" 

He gave God a bit of a bored look and addressed Crowley and Aziraphale instead. "There aren't many people on our level," he said. "After the world didn't end, Mother was really the only one around who understood."

"As I was saying, most of the time, things do not go as planned," God said with a solemn nod to Crowley. Her holy eyes met Aziraphale's and rested there. "It's not necessarily a bad thing."

Aziraphale did not dare breathe. Beneath the table, he squeezed Crowley's hand. "You're giving us a choice," he said. His gaze flicked to the basket. "Aren't you?"

Crowley frowned. "A choice? What do you mean, choice? Choice of what?" 

God tilted Her head toward Aziraphale, a smile playing on Her lips. "You can't guess?"

"Mother," sighed Satan as he claimed the remaining teacup and began spooning in sugar, "can You possibly, just this once, be a tiny bit less unbearable?" 

God pouted. "Oh, you're no fun." She turned back to them and said, "I can restore you. Say the word and you can have your immortality back, the miracles, your powers, all of it." 

"What's the catch?" Crowley asked. 

"No catch," She said. Her hands spread before Her, empty. "On the house, if you want it."

"This is our chance," Aziraphale whispered.

A fiery eyebrow arched at him. "Our what?"

"We can remain mortal," Aziraphale said, "if we so choose." He twisted on the bench seat, taking Crowley's hand in both of his now, with only eyes for him. "Oh, Crowley, you know what my answer will be, don't you? I'm all for it if it's truly what you want."

"What I want?" Crowley paused. Removed his sunglasses with uncharacteristic slowness, revealing eyes wide and shimmering-heat yellow. "I don't understand."

Aziraphale's voice dropped to a soft private whisper again. "You said you couldn't abide raising a child just to watch them grow old and die. If we stayed mortal…" He shrugged. "We could have that. A human life, children. You've wanted this for so long, my love. If this is what it takes, I am willing."

"But— You—" Crowley's hands crawled up Aziraphale's arms to clutch at his shoulders. "You'll die."

Aziraphale mustered up a smile. "Eventually, yes. So will you, if that helps at all."

"Does it?" Crowley asked in a dazed sort of way. 

"I'm not sure." Aziraphale's smile waned. "I admit I very much don't care for that idea. Yet it happens to every human, darling." He touched Crowley's pale cheek. "They manage, somehow. We could too."

"Not sure about that," Crowley said. "You weren't on my side of that glass, angel. How am I supposed to just sit and watch when you—?" He sucked in a breath, bit his lip. Glared at the two all-powerful beings sitting across the table. "Do you mind? This is kind of personal."

"Just ignore us, dear," God said, waving a hand through the air. "Most people do."

"Crowley." Aziraphale's fingertips coaxed Crowley by the chin to face him again. "We'd learn to make our way, just as we've always done. And we could— We could make a family together." His eyes were as soft as feathers. "What do you think?"

Crowley had a lot of thoughts. For one, he was calculating how many years their corporeal forms had left once the clock of mortality started ticking; thirty years, say, forty at the most. Enough time to see a child well into adulthood, though they may not be the most active parents on the playground. Ugh, what if he needed a cane some day? He'd need to make sure it looked fairly slick. Maybe have a sword hidden inside or something.

And after age and illness and all that—death. 

"I won't be separated from you," Crowley said. He clutched tighter. If the other coffee shop patrons stared, let them. "When we die, what happens to us? Do you go to Heaven? I fuck off to Hell?"

"No, of course not." Aziraphale touched his cheek. "We will always find each other. Haven't we proven that?" His unshakable, total faith. 

"Angel, come on," Crowley groaned. "It's not going to work, don't you see?" 

"Yes it would," Aziraphale said. "It could work very well. You would be a superb parent. You would dote on our little child like no one else. It's something you've wanted for yourself, for us, for so long. Why can't we simply—?"

Crowley stopped him with a long finger pressed against his lips. His slitted eyes slid over to God. "Because she'd never let me have this," he said in a shaky voice. "Because this is some sort of test and I'm sure I'm meant to fail it. Because—" He choked on the words. "If she taught me anything, it's that I'm not supposed to want these things. That I don't deserve them. That I won't ever be good enough for that, for _ you _, not ever..."

And the pain and heartache of the last few days finally took its toll on Crowley, who curled against Aziraphale in that little coffee shop in Seven Dials, his face pressed to Aziraphale's soft neck, and breathed hard through his nose, fighting a losing battle against his tears. 

"You see?" Satan drawled. "I'm not the one who has this effect on people. 'They fuck you up, your mom and dad,'" he recited. 

"Oh, don't you quote Larkin at me," God grumbled. Then, turning, "Crowley, sweetheart, I don't know what I can say. Sorry isn't anything, is it? Would it help if I told you I didn't mean for you to feel this way? No, probably not." She shook Her head. "You're right. This is a test. But it's no trick. Does that make sense? It's your decision. Stay human, go back to being immortal. Either way, things will be all right. Just tell me what you'd like." 

"How can you believe Her?" Crowley asked into Aziraphale's throat. "How can you expect me to trust Her?" 

"Oh, my dearest." Aziraphale's hand carded through the wild hair at the back of Crowley's head. He looked back at the basket, then looked harder. Something bloomed inside him, an idea borne of imagination. He considered the basket, then told Crowley, "You don't need to trust God. Just trust me, if you can. It will be enough."

Crowley breathed. Nodded. "More than enough."

Aziraphale's smile was the sunrise. He turned to their two all-powerful visitors. "Before we decide, may I ask one question?"

God leaned back in Her seat, brows raised. "Just one. I have all the knowledge in the universe, so make it count. What do you want to know?"

Aziraphale pointed to the basket. "What have you got in there?"

God clapped, delighted. "Clever boy! Just as I made you." She tipped up the wicker flap and beckoned them. "Come on, take a look."

Aziraphale and Crowley leant forward. 

Inside the basket, swaddled in downy cotton, was a squirming, pink-cheeked baby barely bigger than a shoe. 

Aziraphale glanced up at the Devil. "You really enjoy the handbasket motif, don't you?" He looked over at Crowley in the way all lovers do, to see if their joke has brought their beloved some smidgen of joy, but of course Crowley hadn't heard. He was transfixed, staring into the child's huge brown eyes and not listening to anything but the baby's coo. 

Satan cleared his throat and spoke to Aziraphale in clipped tones. "You might not remember it, but some time ago there was that nasty business with the Nephilim." 

"Yes, of course." Aziraphale frowned. "Children born of the union between human and angel. Or demon, if you believe the propaganda. All hushed up rather quickly." He gazed down at the child in the basket. Crowley was playing with her tiny kicking foot. "Is she—?"

"Immortal," said God. "And with no one to claim her."

"Her parents?" Crowley asked, wrenching his attention away from the basket's contents. "What's happened to them?"

God shrugged. "The angel has been...censured for the misstep. The human was not willing to raise the child alone; can't really blame her, poor thing. They brought her to Lucifer, thinking it would be safer." She grimaced. "I admit I don't have the best track record with this sort of thing."

"And I think it's safe to say I am not a fit parent." The Devil sipped his tea and gazed at God over the rim. "Wonder where I learned that from."

God ignored him gracefully. "In the past, we might have destroyed the child, but as Lucifer so helpfully pointed out to me, we must grow out of our destructive patterns."

"So what do you say?" asked Satan. "You're the only earthbound celestial and occult beings in the universe. Well." He waggled his head. "Now that my estranged son has renounced his legacy." 

God patted his hand consolingly where it lay on the table. 

Crowley tore himself away from his examination of the baby's itty bitty nose and cocked his head. "Seems to me," he said, "that it's pretty useless, you giving us this kid. Say we raise her; then what? She'll only be snuffed out when the war comes, along with everybody else."

"War?" said God.

"War?" said the Devil.

"War?" said Aziraphale. 

"Yes, war!" Crowley threw his hands in the air. "Why do you think your lot and yours," he pointed accusingly at God and Satan, "kidnapped me and tried to kidnap Aziraphale? They wanted to know how we'd done the fire and water thing; they're planning to wipe out humanity and need a leg up. Don't you know what's happening in your own houses!?"

Aziraphale gazed into the distance and gave a quiet hum, the sort you make when things fall into place. 

God pushed the crumbs around Her plate with a thoughtful fingertip. "To be honest," She said, "I don't really read the memos they send me." She looked to Lucifer. "Do you?"

He scratched at his throat with a wince. "I've been focused on myself, haven't I? Making space for my emotions. Working through stuff. Hell sort of runs itself at this point; I was never a micromanager anyway."

There was a pause, then God said, "I wouldn't be surprised, actually, the lot of them wanting to wage war on Earth. Word's gotten around about you two, what you've gotten up to here. If angels and demons get curious, well." She waved a hand at the basket. "Things like this start to happen. Scares the pants off them, I expect."

"Okay. So can we agree that you two should make some calls later and get this war business put firmly on the back burner?" Crowley said. "Since we're suddenly all about breaking out of our destructive patterns." 

"Yes, of course."

"Probably should, yeah."

"And one other thing," Aziraphale piped up. He placed his hand carefully on the baby's soft, velvety head. The child burbled at him, and he smiled. "You don't get to know her name. Not ever." 

Satan made a face. "Now, see here—" 

But Aziraphale was just warming to his theme. "It will not be written in any of your books. You will not note it in the ledgers of Heaven nor Hell. Her name will be completely unknown to you and your legions." Aziraphale looked up. "She will belong to us and to the world. No one else."

Crowley looked at him like he'd hung the moon—which was ridiculous; Gabriel had been in charge of the moon. "Thought I was going to be the protective one."

Aziraphale gave his hand a loving pat on the table for God and anyone to see. "We both will." 

God sighed. "Aziraphale, you know that's impossible. I know All." 

"Ah, yes, but you are also all-powerful, correct?" asked Aziraphale.

"Of course."

"Then can you use your power to make it such that you don't know this one thing?" 

God's forehead creased. "Ugh," She said. "Not one of these brain teasers again. Gives me such a headache."

"But can you?" Aziraphale pressed. 

Lucifer finished his tea and set it down with a clink. "Be a sport, Mother. Seems a small favor in the grand scheme of things."

"Oh, all right." God blinked. "There. I don't know it, and I never will, and neither will he." She tipped Her head at the Devil. "Anything else? While I'm messing with the guts of reality?"

"One last thing," Aziraphale said, glowing. He turned to Crowley. "I think we're ready to be immortal again."

* * *

The cottage was difficult to find if you didn't know where to look. 

The lane that led there was usually misty, often unpaved, and had no name. Your sat-nav wouldn't get you there, not in a million years. But, oh, it was beautiful. 

It was surrounded by rolling countryside, the sort that looked ethereal when bathed in early morning light and demonic when an evening thunderstorm rolled in. Everywhere you looked, there was a view more gorgeous than the last. Hikers blown off course sometimes came close to the cottage, saw it from a distance and thought, gosh, wouldn't it be terribly nice to live in a place like that. But then they would squint at the wide expanse of nothing around it and think, nah, too remote. No mobile service. Wifi was probably shit. And after you had your fill of the view, what was there to do? Nothing. Bugger that, the hikers muttered to themselves as they slogged in their wellies back to the trail. 

Aziraphale and Crowley were not yet bored with the view, however, because they had very little free time in which to enjoy it. Raising a child who possessed some talent for miraculous workings filled their days just plenty, thank you. Imagine being a kid again and having the ability to make triple chocolate layer cake appear whenever you liked. 

Exactly. They had their work cut out for them. 

It was a good thing, then, that they were an angel and a demon, and therefore did not tire easily. 

Coffee helped. Crowley was making a new batch in his French press that very morning, in fact, leaning blearily against the kitchen counter in his pajamas. Well, the bottom half of his pajamas; the top had been sacrificed to some spit-up during the baby's nighttime feeding and he hadn't quite gotten around to replacing it. 

"Is the kettle empty?" asked Aziraphale as he slotted in behind Crowley with his arms around his skinny waist, chin hooked onto his thin shoulder. 

"Nah." Crowley switched on their electric kettle before plunging his coffee into something drinkable. "Which teabag, angel?"

"The one with the hint of anise today, I think." 

Crowley made a noise of playful disgust, but fetched the tea from the cupboard above his head anyway.

"You don't have to drink it," Aziraphale laughed, "just plunk it in my mug for me. Ah, thank you, darling," he said as Crowley not only did that, but poured the hot water over it. "Such a helpful house-husband you are."

"Sod off," Crowley said with boundless affection, and twisted his head to kiss Aziraphale on his morning-soft mouth. 

The kiss might have lengthened into something else, but the baby chose that moment to wake up and let her dissatisfaction with the state of things be known far and wide. The wail could bring down the walls of Jericho (not literally, or at least they hoped). 

"My turn?" Aziraphale asked at the same time Crowley said, "Your turn." 

The angel gave Crowley's brow a parting kiss, swiping the bangs from Crowley's forehead to do so. "Your hair is getting long, my dear," he remarked as he padded out of the kitchen with his tea. "My barber in the village is more than competent, you know." 

"I know." Crowley gulped his hot coffee. "Thinking I might grow it out again."

"Vagabond!" Aziraphale called from the stairs, and Crowley smiled into his cup.

* * *

"Now that she's walking," Crowley said one sunny spring day much, much later, "do you think we need to, I don't know, miracle the stairs so she can't fall down them?"

"We could just put up a gate," Aziraphale said reasonably. "They sell them on the internet." 

Crowley hummed noncommittally. He didn't particularly like gates, or think they'd be very effective against their daughter, but it was an idea. He squeezed Aziraphale's hand in his as they walked down the country lane, their child toddling ahead on her wobbly legs. She was reaching for a bird flitting about in the trees that lined the path, making urgent sounds with her beginner's voice. 

"Listen to her," Aziraphale said with pride. "She sounds just like you."

"Oh, I'm a babbler, is that it?"

"And I love it, darling." Aziraphale's eyes twinkled. He was referring, not very obliquely, to that very morning when he'd woken Crowley with a kiss, then a caress, then more until Crowley had sputtered the most delicious nonsense. 

Crowley adjusted his jeans at the waist. They clung in a way that reminded him of the morning's activities. "Lucky for me, then." 

Aziraphale seemed ready to kiss him right there on the walking path, but then his eyes darted up ahead. "No, sweetling! We do not eat leaves!" he said, and flew to stop their kid from stuffing a whole pudgy fistful into her mouth.

Crowley stood and watched them some yards ahead: Aziraphale kneeling in the dirt without a care for his trouser knees, fussing over their girl with his handkerchief, trying to wipe her cheek though she squirmed like the dickens to get away. 

"I suppose it wouldn't harm you, really, what with your constitution," he murmured as he swiped, "but there are so many tastier things in the world." 

_ Yeah_, Crowley thought as he breathed in the sight of his angel and his daughter. He was sleep-deprived and addled and hadn't had a proper night's drinking in ages, but still. _ Not a bad job. _

"No regrets?" said a voice from the woods.

Crowley peered into the trees to see God standing there, kitted out in hiking boots and sensible outdoorsy attire. 

"Oh, I see," he drawled easily despite his thudding heart. "_You _ get to ask questions." He glanced ahead, but Aziraphale and the kid were still wrapped up in each other, laughing and making silly faces, and hadn't noticed the intrusion. 

"Relax," God said. "You don't have to answer. Just thought I'd check in." 

"No need. We're brilliant." Then, because Crowley couldn't stop himself from bragging when it came to his little girl, "She miracled her first spontaneous combustion the other day. Doesn't like coriander, apparently. Set the whole takeaway on fire when I offered her a bite." 

God's laugh was as light as icing sugar. "Isn't that something! Good for little…." She looked to Crowley to complete the sentence. 

Crowley smiled with all his teeth. "Nice try."

"Good for her," God said flatly.

"You can't stand it, can you? Not knowing?" Crowley tossed his hair, longer now than it had been in ages, and let it settle behind his shoulders. "Now you know how the rest of us feel." 

"At any rate," God continued as if he hadn't spoken, "I am happy for you. Truly."

"Don't need you to be happy," Crowley said, grinning wider, keener. "Don't need you at all, actually. No offense." 

God gave him a little smile. "Yes. I know _ that _ at least."

"Da!" 

Crowley whirled at the sound of his new name. Aziraphale was walking toward him with the child cradled in his arms, the both of them radiant. 

"I believe we're ready," said his angel. "We might actually make it to the top of the hill today. What do you think, shall we keep going?"

Crowley turned back to the woods, but of course they were empty.

"Darling?" asked Aziraphale.

"Yeah." Crowley shook himself from his thoughts. "Yeah, let's go."

"Da," said their daughter firmly, reaching out toward him. 

"Looks like I'm on duty. Let's go, you ragamuffin," Crowley said, and swung her onto his shoulders. She crowed in triumph and lifted her chubby fists to the sky. 

"Gahgggk," she said, and her parents quite agreed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's it for this one! Hope you enjoyed it. Thanks so much for reading <3

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me [@triedunture](https://twitter.com/triedunture) on Twitter.


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